(audience applauds)
-: Hey.
Good afternoon.
It's my pleasure today to have one of my best friends, Beth.
She's a unique breed of nerd lawyer,
which are becoming slightly more common these days,
but not enough, but enough to attract
a couple other nerd lawyers to this audience.
But I actually first met Beth before she was so fancy
and famous, when she was working on trying to build tools
for open government and kind of complaining from the outside
that government should be more open, government
should be more geeky, and then the government decided,
okay, well, you come and do it.
And then they recruited her to be, was it the first
deputy chief technology officer of the White House?
And she had a little section of the executive building
which I was able to visit, and she had a big label
called Open Gov Land, and she sat me down,
I was running Creative Commons at the time,
and I was like an arms dealer of openness.
And she had all these different departments
marching through, learning from us how to be open.
But she ran a lot of the open government or all
of the open government stuff at the White House at the time.
And so, I guess that was, the title was,
you're the founder and director of the White House
Open Government Initiative, and that was a very stressful
but very impactful period of your life.
And now, she's a visiting professor at the NYU
Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service,
and also a visiting professor here at the Media Lab,
and we're just in the process of ramping up the work
that she's gonna be doing here with us.
So we'll hopefully get to hear a lot about that.
And she's also the founder and director
of the Governance Lab, funded by two great foundations,
the Knight Foundation and the MacArthur Foundation.
But without any more blah, blah, blah for me,
I'll have Beth come up and give us some thoughts.
-: Thank you very much.
Now comes the blah, blah, blah from me instead.
(audience applauds)
So, I was asked today to talk about governance innovation
and to talk about the way
that technology is changing government.
And in thinking about the innovations that are
most prevalent and that we're most familiar with,
it seemed to me the case that what we're seeing
is the emergence of a tremendous amount of innovation,
above all in the private sector.
So we have retail companies like Zara who are producing
10,000 products and are able, because of their use
of big data, to actually get those products manufactured,
in the stores, to us, based on our preferences
as demonstrated by the, what shop clerks are measuring
and by what we're buying in a matter of weeks,
not in a matter of months.
You have big pharma companies like Eli Lily
who are using the advances in expert networking
and in collaboration and communications technology
to reach out now to 270,000 solvers,
a community of experts around the world,
across 70 countries, who are able to solve
hard scientific problems faster than the internal R&D
departments of these pharma companies can do themselves.
This kind of expert networking and use of communications
technology is, of course, at the forefront
in companies like Gerson Lehrman,
one of the leading expert networking platforms
that brings together a community of experts to help
solve problems for some of the world's largest bank
equity companies and financial institutions
as well as other Fortune 500 companies.
We then see technological innovations that are put to great
use in doing things like delivering the shoes that I'm
wearing, or probably most of the outfit that I'm wearing,
companies like Zappos, that pride themselves on the use
of technology to deliver better customer service to you
and me, and we're, of course, all familiar with the use
of social recommender systems and reputation systems
to help tell us what books to buy
on Amazon and on other technologies.
Now we're seeing the emergence, of course,
of the use of platforms for connecting people
to one another to disintermediate institutions
like hotels, to allow me to rent out a hotel room
to you on platforms like Airbnb, and thanks to the work
of Nick Grossman and others at the MIT Media Lab,
we're seeing a tremendous upsurge in this use
of technology to build the peer economy.
Technology's in the news today, in fact,
around the use of deeply quantitative analytics
to help deliver more targeted advertising
on platforms like Facebook and others that we're
familiar with to give us a more content-rich experience,
and also, of course, these kinds of companies,
these sorts of platform companies,
whether it's Facebook or Twitter that are platforms
that allow us, that enable us and encourage us
to create the content in the way that Threadless does
of making the t-shirts that we then buy on these platforms.
These, what I would call network-native, companies,
are recognizing that we're creating the value,
and that instead of them having to build a large-scale
institution with many employees,
you can instead create a platform that allows
you and me to be creative, to express ourselves,
and to create and sell those t-shirts.
So we're seeing tech-driven transformation
around a series of technologies that are in,
that fall into some buckets.
There's the big data and highly computational technologies.
There are the communications tools that allow us
to better leverage expertise and do expert networking.
There are what I might call the better service delivery
technologies, but these are not only new technological
innovations, but they're advances that we're making
in the social sciences about the incentives
that cause people to wanna use these platforms.
So, what are the incentives that cause us
to wanna make a t-shirt or to buy a t-shirt
that someone else has made?
Social science is really helping us to understand how these,
to design these platforms and how to get them used.
These are very outcome-oriented, leading to real results,
but those results are ultimately
about improving the bottom line for someone.
So, we have these wonderful big data technologies
that help us to deliver better retail services,
but it's not only technology; it's also the hard work
of victims and workers in places like Bangladesh
that allow us to buy those clothes
from companies like H&M and Zara and the like.
Eli Lily and these other drug companies are using
an incentive to solve R&D problems,
but we still have the issue of how to get AIDS drugs
and other life-saving technologies to places like Africa.
Gerson Lehrman is doing a great job of reaching out
on behalf of banks to make better investment decisions,
but to the end of what?
Of making people richer in the world.
And of course the peer economy technologies
are still very fraught.
I did take an Uber to get here in Boston
and this morning in New York, thanks to Joey,
who introduced me to Uber some time ago,
but we still have a long way to go
for the adoption of these kinds of peer-based technologies.
So, the question I have is why can't we
and how do we take the innovations that we're seeing
in the private sector and apply them not to the bottom line
but to solving really hard public problems, to delivering
public goods and making everyone's life better.
For the most part, when we think of government,
it still looks like this, right?
Bureaucracy is still a very centralized conception
of people sitting in government offices,
working in closed environments, and most of us,
when we think about our relationship
to or our engagement with government, our interaction
is really centered around the act of voting,
which happens, at best, once every year.
So how do we take these innovations, these tech-based
innovations, and start to bring them into the solving
of public problems, the delivering of public goods,
and creating public solutions?
There are the beginnings of innovations that are emerging.
So there are experiments with new ways of gathering
information, and we're seeing in places like Finland,
experiments with creating legislation in new
and more open ways that are also being replicated
in Russia, in Latvia, and elsewhere.
We see the emergence of platforms,
whether it's the improvements around regulations.gov
that are allowing people to comment in more effective ways,
the use of brainstorming platforms to getting new ideas
to help governments solve problems, the creation
of more peer-based platforms like Ushahidi,
or the use of prediction markets that are being
experimented with to help solve public policy problems.
We're using big data, in fact,
as we saw sadly after the fact
to try to help solve the problem of the Boston bombers.
We see just the emergence now of programs like that,
of NYU's Center for Urban Science and Progress,
work that's being done here in Sandy Pentland
and other labs here at the MIT Media Lab
around using big data to help policymakers
solve problems more effectively, to pinpoint
where is the noise and where is the traffic and where is
the pollution so we can target scarce enforcement resources.
We're using big data to develop apps like those
that are being showcased at Health Datapalooza next week
and in previous years to help us as individuals
like, make better decisions about our own buying habits,
about our own healthcare choices.
And of course we're seeing the use of big data
now being, the openness of data that Joey talked about,
being used by even such august institutions
as the White House to begin to solve public problems
together like improving the White House website.
I could tell you that when I got there, I was told,
I am not allowed to mention the word hack,
let alone hackathon, in public, and now, of course,
it's only a few years later that we have the White House
Official Hackathon with the official White House logo.
It was a pretty good laugh for me.
We are starting to use engagement technologies
to get people, as challenge.gov does,
to enable agencies to put out problems to citizens
and to get them to solve them, whether it's developing
recipes to help children eat a healthier diet
or developing a next-generation combat vehicle.
This is a way to actually engage people
according to their highest and best use,
to engage them according to their talents;
I might add to also circumvent procurement regulations
and rule to get people working with agencies
on developing solutions that work.
We see lots of governments experimenting now with the use
of technology to improve customer service delivery
and the delivery of services to citizens more effectively.
We're starting to see the emergence of the peer economy
solutions applied now also in the public sector.
So this is one of my favorite examples,
the fire department app out of California,
which connects 911 to a network of CPR certified citizens,
to send a signal to you or to me if we're CPR certified
when there's someone nearby who's having a heart attack
so that we can get to the victim's side faster
than a first responder can, potentially saving their life.
The kind of expert networking techniques and technologies
you've seen with places like Gerson Lehrman
are of course something we applied in the Peer-to-Patent
Project that we developed a number of years ago,
which was to get volunteer scientists and technologists
involved in and engaged with the National Patent Office
in helping to supply better information
to bring down the backlog and improve the effectiveness
and the information with which we examine and decide
ultimately who gets a patent, a project which was
subsequently rolled out in pilots around the word,
and it now continues to live on in the form
of the Ask Patents Project on Stack Exchange.
At the time, Eric Schmidt of Google asked the question,
why do we not have a Peer-to-Patent
for every branch of government?
Why are we not bringing these kinds of innovations,
why do we not see them everywhere?
Why are they not the norm?
Well, engagement ultimately,
this kind of openness, this kind of agile
and experimental way of working, is hard, right?
You can't, I think you can see this from here.
You know, we tried to open up how we started to work
in government, and it actually, we got, of course,
a lot of criticism from all sides, inside and outside,
something we can talk a little bit more about.
I got my picture in the New York Times,
I always like to say, that's the photo credit
that we, it's a nice picture, right?
We used it for this one, so it was useful for something,
but what was the article about,
it was about how I was the idiot who turned on the tap
at the White House website and let people comment
about why we should legalize marijuana,
where is the president's birth certificate,
why the president is from Mars,
or why his birth certificate is on a UFO or whatever.
It's very hard to begin this culture shift towards a more
open and more innovative, more agile way of working.
A couple of impediments that I wanna sort of point out.
One is is that from academic circles,
I think we have long-time, and I come out of this tradition
of political science and political theory,
we have for a long time worshiped the ideal of deliberation,
the notion of citizens coming and sitting together
and talking with each other as a way of creating
a more civic and a more civil society.
But in fact, so many of these experiments are divorced
from the world of institutions, from power, from money,
from actual decision making.
We have been too content for too long
with letting people sit in church basements
and talk to one another while deals get made
and decisions taken in the back rooms behind closed doors
in the halls of Washington and Brussels.
But at the same time, we need a way,
if we're going to engage with and create more openness
and ask for more innovative ways of solving problems,
we need to do it in a way that works, that's focused
and manageable and not simply a thousand
flowers blooming, that's not simply a plebiscite.
At the same time, one of the other challenges
from the institutional side is the desire to do things
that work for a lot of people.
Voting is great, because it's the same
and it's uniform across a large population.
Similarly, the idea of launching a petitions site,
whether it's in the White House or 10 Downing Street,
is a great idea, 'cause it reaches a lot of people
with a small amount of technology, but in ways that are
actually fairly useless to actual real decision making.
The people who make the decisions need more information
than just a demand to do something.
They need facts, they need data,
they need examples, they need budgets.
They need the kinds of things that we all do
to make decisions on a day-to-day basis.
And of course we see lots of innovations,
many of which I've already talked about,
that exist in civil society that are using data, that are
using these kinds of innovations, but they are again
divorced from how we make decisions and how we spend money.
So, I think the real question is, as we think
about how to apply the science of design,
the innovations of technology,
how we think about creating a design science for democracy,
how those people who are students who are about to graduate
from this august institution.
This is graduation season, right?
So I'm not a commencement speaker.
I'm sure you've been one many times,
and this is the first day of the rest of your lives.
Well, if the rest of our lives are about thinking
about how to take the skills that have been acquired
in places like this to solving hard public problems,
we have to think about, how do we move towards institutions,
towards redesigning institutions, and making them work
in ways that take advantage of the big data,
the computational, the communications and the collaboration
technology that we have to work in more decentralized ways.
It is ultimately an experiment.
That is a conference that we held a few weeks ago
to try to think about what are the ways in which we can try
to create new kinds of institutions that can work in these
new ways, that are decentralized and yet progressive.
And that is the mission that we've set for ourselves
in our new project called the Gov Lab,
it's meant to rhyme with Media Lab, but it's thinking about,
how do we redesign not just government, but governance,
how we solve public problems
and create public goods together,
how we create institutions that we believe can,
by working in more open ways, can not simply be more
democratic in a philosophical sense and therefore more
legitimate, but more effective in the way that they work.
MIT is really sort of the ground zero of action-oriented
research, the belief that we're not only doing things
in the abstract, but we are doing them not simply in the lab
but in the field, working with real-world institutions
to bring about real-world change, to model new,
a new vision of what democracy and democratic institutions
can look like when they benefit from the type
of innovations that get developed here.
So lemme just close by talking about one specific
or one or two specific examples of where I think
some of this research needs to go in order to bring us
towards the future which might be possible,
and that is beginning to think about how do we take,
how do we create institutions that are more open
and better able therefore, that are ready to tap
the intelligence and expertise and know-how
of a distributed population of people
to make decisions more effectively.
When we had our experiment conference a few weeks ago,
we had, we now know him as Phil.
Phil is also know as the honorable.
(Beth speaks in foreign language)
He is the Minister of Youth and ICT of Rwanda
who came to the conference as an institutional leader,
as a cabinet minister, to say,
I want to make things work better in my country.
I want to tap the intelligence and expertise
of the people in my community, in the region,
around the continent, and I don't know how to do it.
I don't know how to use the tools that we saw
at the beginning to solve the kinds of challenges
and problems that Rwanda faces.
Well, one challenge is how do you actually find out
and figure out who knows what?
Who are the experts?
And we understand experts to be broadly here,
people with know-how, with experience, with passion.
We asked this question when I was at the White House
in a project we nicknamed ExpertNet,
which was, I have to thank 'em.
Many people from MIT participated very actively
in the wiki we set up to ask, how do we actually create
a public platform for figuring out who has expertise
and asking them questions?
Well, since we did that two or three years ago,
there have been tremendous numbers of platforms
that have evolved that didn't exist then.
There's VIVO, which now connects
tens of thousands of scientists.
Many of you might participate in VIVO,
essentially an open-source Facebook for scientists.
You have SciENcv.
You have the FDA Project.
You have the Harvard Profile Catalyst Project.
All of these are emerging to allow us to identify who knows
what, so that we might be able to ask them a question.
And then we have to figure out, even after we know
who knows what, how do we create incentives for people
on the institutional side to ask and on the public side
to answer after so long where we have never had
an opportunity to participate or to be engaged.
We can draw lessons from and understand
based on the practices of private sector technologies
we've seen, of the experiences of places
like InnoCentive or Stack Exchange, where we have
a lot of experience with how to use reputation
and rating technologies, with getting people
to successfully ask and answer questions.
Those of you who might be in the Haystack group
have been doing, of course, deep work on thinking
about exactly these types of questions, or at USC
in Taplin's lab there who are thinking about, again,
what are the typologies of different forms of network
collaboration for people to ask and answer questions,
because unless we come up with some better understanding
of what is the toolkit by which to know what kinds
of questions lend themselves to what kinds of answers,
how do, what is the toolkit we can use to reach out
and ask people and engage with them.
It's still going to be a very, very long way to get
to the end result of institutions that are more,
that are ready to be open, that know how to be open,
that know how to ask and to give us all
an opportunity to participate.
So, this means designing the platforms for new,
if we wanna think about it like this, it's new,
the new institutional platforms to redesign our institutions
by doing some core things, I think.
We have to think about, in the way that Sir Tim Berners-Lee
does in his group across the street,
is how do we think about taking the data that we're
starting to make much more open on the government side
and the data that abounds, and to make it much, much
more useful and intelligible to each one of us
to inform the conversations that we might have
about how to solve problems.
We were just up the street talking to Susan's folks
at Emerson College and who work with the New Urban
Mechanics group in Boston who are doing a lot of thinking
about this issue about how when we set up a government
project do we ensure that from the get go,
it starts to throw off data that we can use
to actually figure out what works.
This is some of the most important work, thank you Susan,
that people like you are doing to help to think
about how do we create data that we can use
quickly enough to know what works.
There's a plethora of opportunities and projects and apps
now to connect people to each other to solve problems,
the peer economy side of governance.
So one of my students designed this wonderful project
that he proposed for matching people who have compost
in New York to people who have a car that wanna drive it
to the one compost location that exists in Queens.
There are none in the Bronx and two in Brooklyn.
It's kind of staggering.
And as a result, you need to match people
who have skills with people who have needs.
So whether it's I have compost and you have a car
or I have a blanket and you need a blanket
after a hurricane, or whatever the need might be,
we need to platforms that help connect neighbors
to each other to solve our problems.
We also need very much to think
about this issue of who works.
Now when we talk about what works in institutions or trying
to bring innovation to the way that democracy functions,
we do that how?
We have a government program.
We give 50,000 bucks to a consulting company.
They write a report based on some three-year-old data
and saying the program works or doesn't work,
and it gets put in a drawer.
But this opportunity that we have now to create
open peer review systems to get lots of people,
including the people who are affected by, who receive
the service, to participate in setting the agenda,
defining what the metrics are in saying what worked,
to use data help tell us in real time what worked
I think is really the opportunity that we face.
We need to actually take into our hands this project
and this problem of designing not simply the technology
but the institutions that use that technology
to help serve us.
It means thinking about the design of the legal context,
thinking about the policy context, thinking about the tools
that we can use and thinking about really the research
that we need to do to help us to answer this question
of how to bring innovations into public institutions
so that we can be, on the one hand, agile and effective,
and at the same time, maintain the certainty
and the due process and the stability that we come
to depend on from effective democratic institutions.
But I leave it to you that I think it is incumbent
upon all of us, especially those of us who think
about design, who think about technology, to take this
as one of, if not the core, of our mission, to think
about how we take the innovations that we're developing,
the tools and the skills that we've developed,
to truly work on stuff that matters, namely, the future
and the stability and the robustness of our democracy
and the reinvigoration of effective government.
Thank you.
(audience applauds)
Where'd that coffee go?
Okay.
-: Thanks, Beth.
And before we jump into our conversation, first of all,
for people who are watching on the video stream,
if you #mltalks, we'll be looking at those,
and if you have any questions,
feel free to tweet them and we'll bring them up.
So we'll probably start a conversation,
and then we'll bring the audience in halfway through or so,
and then later, we'll have mics
for people who wanna ask questions and talk.
And if you get very anxious,
you can go ahead and raise your hand anyway.
But before I go onto the substance, I actually have
this story I tell about you all the time,
and I have never actually checked with you
whether it's true or not, so I thought I'd do that
while we're streaming on the internet.
(Beth laughs)
But, so when I was, when I was at.
-: I deny everything.
-: When I was at Creative Commons
and you were at the White House,
you were helping us a lot on trying to help
proliferate open using Creative Commons as a tool,
and I remember there was a lot of resistance,
'cause the government thought that we were just some little,
we were a vendor, and we weren't a standard.
But the same lawyers that said that said that they thought
that the Worldwide Web may just be a fad, so.
But anyway, I remember the conversation,
which was we were trying to get textbooks released
under a Creative Commons license,
and you were helping us push this bill through I think
the Department of Labor, Department of Ed,
and it was a big bill.
I think it was three billion dollars or something, right?
And there's a famous phone call that everybody talks about
where there are a bunch of lawyers sitting around
trying to explain why we can't put Creative Commons
in the legislature, but I knew, and we all knew,
that if you didn't put it in there, you just said open,
everyone would start coming up
with their own interpretation of open.
So I think Beth was pushing very strongly that Creative
Commons be used, and there were this army of lawyers.
And the version of the story I heard was that you said
something like, by the power vested in me
by the executive office, I order you to stand down
and made all the lawyers shut up.
Is that, is that true?
(Beth laughs)
And I may have heard it, I think I may have heard it.
-: It is far better if I don't answer that question.
But the.
Did I ever say something like that?
-: I think I heard from somebody else
who was on the call, but anyway.
-: I think that was an interpretation of the tone
in my voice, the exacerbated tone in my voice.
But I think I'm gonna own up to,
I'm gonna claim credit for that, 'cause I love it.
By the power vested in me by the state of cyber space.
(both laughing)
There's a lot of truth to the story.
There was a first part to this story, which was
when we were coming into office in 2008
and wanted to move, so it was really important to me
that we send a signal about open by opening up,
by making clear, which was already the legal state
of affairs, that under US copyright law,
information created by the federal government
is not subject to copyright; it's in the public domain.
So there was a no-lose, no-lose situation for us to declare
that on the White House website and to make absolutely clear
and use a Creative Commons license to do it,
to say that all the information that was
on the White House website would be in the public domain
and that any comments that we received on the site were also
then licensed for free use.
So I remember in that case sitting on a,
I was in a hill in San Francisco sitting in a car,
I suppose my car, having these discussions with the lawyers
about this question of whether we should use
a Creative Commons license or not and getting
into quite a vociferous argument, letting go
of the steering wheel and rolling backwards down the hill.
Luckily, it was, everything ended well and fine,
but I think that was the first step towards signaling
and getting people accustomed to the idea,
not only that open was important as a norm for transparency
and accountability's sake, but that open for reuse
could be an incredibly important and powerful tool
for stimulating economic development,
for creating jobs, and for building businesses.
And so the story that you're also referring
to is the case of an extraordinarily large government
grant program, four billion dollars, where materials created
under that grant would be subject to the condition
that what got created was free for reuse
with the notion, and that was the thing
that was really hard for people to get their minds around,
that it could lead to important economic development
and growth, the result of what we would do,
and I think that's really become part of the cornerstone
of the open government movement, is the idea that it can be
a driver for a lot of innovation and economic development
as well as for transparency in a traditional sense.
-: And I'm gonna ask one last nerdy question
that people may not care about, but I care about.
-: Oh, it's geek chic, not nerdy.
-: But I, I remember going to the White House
and being told that everything that was
government-funded was public domain, only in America.
And I remember ending up with the lawyer of the GSA saying,
okay, so I'm gonna go to NASA and all these agencies
and ask them to waive those rights.
He says, no, you have no right,
they have no right to waive those rights, because those
are assets of the American, of the United States of America,
and I, as the general counsel of the GSA,
control those assets, and it was this crazy conversation
about why Wikipedia wouldn't be able to use NASA photos
that could be viewed from other countries.
Didn't you guys fix that?
(Beth laughs)
-: Well, whether we fixed, I think what we have to,
whether we've started to fix the issue of legal education
and how we teach copyright and how we teach
intellectual property in this country
and the notion that open can actually, again,
be a driver of growth and innovation
rather than owning enclosed and holding.
This is about a cultural shift more than anything else.
So what we did fix, so to speak, was the, I think,
is that there's now a much wider-spread understanding
that the law was and always is that content
created by the federal government is in the public domain.
Not content funded by the federal government,
and we still have a long way to go, and this is still
controversial, as that grant program demonstrated,
but to make the case that again,
things that the government funds, that as a condition
of getting money from the government, you should
make things open, we're still trying to study that.
But this notion that it's ours and the data is ours,
I think if you look at the fact that two weeks ago,
the president signed a new executive order on open data
in which it was made very clear with significant detail
about implementation that the data and information
that the government holds is free and open
and must be made available in free and open ways
with a specific implementation guide for how to do that.
I think that there is, you know,
significant buy-in around this issue.
I don't think you would have that conversation today
in the same way that the conversation I had,
which was, you know, literally being called
into the general counsel's office to be told
don't use the word hack in public,
you know, and now we have the White House Hackathon.
We've come a long way, baby.
-: That's good to hear.
Maybe I should go back.
I got scared away after that
sort of firing line of lawyers that I had to face.
-: There are a lot of other countries that you need,
I mean, that you need to visit, and in fact,
I just got interviewed by a researcher from Japan
who wanted to talk about licensing, open data licensing
in the US, and I kept having to say, well, we don't
have to license it, because it's in the public domain.
But what do you mean?
Don't you need, no, no.
The interview was actually extremely repetitive
and extremely short, because I kept having to say,
actually, if it's created by the federal government,
it's really not an issue.
But that doesn't begin to answer the question of openness
around corporate data and other data that I might provide,
you know, to a whole manner of other companies and vendors
and organizations, not to mention the government,
and incidentally, let me not, let me be very clear, though,
lest, I'm sure I'm, I can't see the Twitter fall behind me
at the moment, but I'm probably getting excoriated
from the notion that the, again, the theory
that the data should be open and the practice,
we still have a long way to go towards implementation,
but at least the commitment is there,
and we just have a long way to go to do this.
-: Right.
-: Especially on a lot of controversial data.
-: And that's what keeps people like Bridgespan
and Carl Malamud in business, is taking that
unreadable data and making it readable.
But you know what's, what I find though that's interesting
about, and this pivots now to more practical stuff,
like the stuff that you're working, the stuff at Code
for America, unless people actually try to use the data,
you don't realize what's broken, you know?
And I think that now that the government's kind of announced
that they're gonna make data open, for instance,
when we did Safecast and we were trying to get
radiation data from RadNet, well, it turns out,
it's supposed to be open.
We couldn't figure it out, so we enlisted Ray Ozzie,
which, he was kind of involved in that,
and he couldn't figure out how to get the data.
And we said, okay, well, then it's definitely broken.
But you don't know that it's broken unless you need it.
You don't need it unless you try to use it.
And I think that's one of the questions that I have,
is, you know, thinking a little bit about the Media Lab
as well, what are the kinds of things that you're, you think
you're gonna be able to use the data for right away?
And what's, there's like, categories,
but what's the most exciting for you?
-: Oh, well, so, there's surely,
what you're seeing a lot of getting used right away,
so let me just say, there's a lot of this kind of app
generation in different sectors, and look, you saw
at Boston was at the forefront of doing things
like making apps for, the when is my bus coming apps,
which are very, very prevalent here.
I talked to a regulator in Denmark who described
a similar phenomenon, a phenomenon of what he described
as the where is the public toilet app.
So there tends to be a use of datasets around solving
problems that people really understand well and they get.
So wanting to know when is my bus coming
or when is my subway coming, when is the T gonna come,
if you look at sort of Health Datapalooza next week,
which is gonna focus on, and the UK just had
a similar kind of health apps innovation conference,
consumer-facing apps in specific sectors like health
where there's been a lot of data that's been put out,
where there's an extraordinary amount of demand,
and where there is the notion of, you know,
potential business opportunities.
So I think that's, but it's around things
that people sort of get, like biofeedback on my heart rate.
What I think is the second stage or what we really
need a lot of help with is getting people,
whether it's from inside institutions
or from interest groups or from elsewhere
to really articulate what are the problems that they're
trying to solve, and where data could be helpful to do that.
So to give you an example, we had this sort of scandal
that erupted in the last couple of weeks about the IRS
in this country targeting a particular official in Ohio,
and the IRS targeting conservative groups
for special enforcement or heightened enforcement
with regard to their tax-exempt status.
So, whether it's in that sector or any other,
the notion of, the idea that we could use data
to give us better feedback about where we should
actually target our enforcement, in fact, there's data,
and this is an issue that Carl has been working on
and I've worked on and others, which is if we actually
opened up the data that the IRS holds about tax exempt
in this country, we could actually, data scientists
could start to do the kind of computations
that would help us to spot patterns of fraud and abuse,
so we could know where to target our enforcement practices.
We can only investigate a certain number of claims,
and rather than leave it up to the discretion
of an official who might have this kind of bias,
we can use data to actually help us to see and spot
where the problems are.
And I think that kind of conversation that happens
between the technology community and those who also
have a deep understanding of the policy and the problems,
to give you another example students of mine
worked on last week, we had officials from Newark,
from Cory Booker's office in Newark, New Jersey
who came and explained to us there's a problem in Newark
that when food stamps come out on a specific day
of the month, which, by law, they come out, for whatever
historical reason, food stamps all come out on the same day.
Let's called it the third day of the month.
On the fourth, lo and behold,
the prices go up in certain stores.
So, you or I would never know about this problem,
but once someone makes clear, to have them come and say,
hey, there's a problem and we need your help,
and we need not only to take the data
that the government already holds about food stamps,
about populations, about where the grocery stores are
located, but we might need you and me to take our iPhones
and go out or our Android phones and go out to the stores
and start to take pictures of what the prices are
or to gather data and be part of that data gathering mission
to spot where that fraud and abuse is happening
so that we can help to solve the problem together.
So I think what's really exciting is, so,
the first wave is stuff that's kind of easy and obvious.
The second wave, though, is these opportunities
that we haven't fully yet realized to pinpoint hard problems
and to get people engaged around the challenge
of solving what those problems are.
The third wave, of course, is gonna be the politically
controversial, difficult, and hard data that is
politically controversial around security and secrecy
and other military/industrial kinds of, of data.
But I think there's so much to do to begin with just
to address problems that we face around health,
around education, around our wellbeing,
that could be informed better by data.
-: Yeah, 'cause it seems like there's a, I don't know
if there's more than two, but at least two categories,
a category of data that makes a politician's life easier,
which they're happy to give you,
and then probably data that makes it difficult.
-: Right.
-: And then I think Lessig made a very nuanced argument
in some, I think it was in the Atlantic, I can't remember.
But the argument was that transparency without a nuanced
understanding of how to interpret
the data could actually be negative.
So even though Lessig it very against corruption,
he also then asserts that if you could,
if people just got the raw data of who was contributing
to who, it may not have the causality that you think,
and it may make somebody look bad without, you know,
and also, the fact that, you know, if you use data
to just support certain positions and certain arguments,
the data could be used, you know, not,
to create lack of clarity rather than clarity.
And so, when it starts to involve politics
and it starts to involve things, and this is where
data journalists I think become really important.
-: Yeah.
-: But how do you find it, first of all,
how do you find the government reacting
to being pushed to open that sort of data up,
and then do you see a, who do you see,
what do you see needed right now to provide
the thoughtful context that you might need
for some of the more sensitive data?
-: So I think that you've surely, you know,
to some extent, the question is,
the answer is contained in the question,
in that the role of data infomediaries
and others to help interpret what we're seeing,
to help tell the story, you know, they say the story
is the last mile of open data, to help interpret
what we're seeing, to create the visualizations,
is extremely, extremely important part of that,
and whether that's the role of data journalists
or the role of academics or the role of a new data savvy
kinds of decision makers and leaders and students
and whatnot, I mean, I think there are a lot of people
in a position to play that role,
to help us understand what we're seeing.
I think it's also a reason why it's extremely important
that we also not limit ourselves to the category
of things like spending data and traditional accountability
data because of exactly the fact that, first of all,
there's enormous classes of data and information
that we can use to solve problems in,
in ways that are not controversial necessarily
or that can help us to greatly improve
what we're doing over what we're doing today.
Even if, you know, we can always read statistics
in different ways, you know, the notion that we could take
this IRS data about the nonprofits and potentially use it
to do a better job than we do today to target enforcement,
or the datasets that we have about enforcement in any one
of a number of places that government takes responsibility
for doing things like policing dangerous toys,
or fraudulent securities, that we could use data
to help us protect people's lives better,
that we could use it to help create tools for you and for me
to make better decisions and being
more empowered in the decisions that we make.
So there's a whole category of problems that we can
begin to address in new ways using data,
but more importantly, using the engagement
that comes with the use of that data.
And I think it's really important to point out
that open data by itself doesn't tell you anything.
Transparency, you know, you can have,
so a lot of this, this stuff is out there.
It sits in a dataset somewhere.
I mean, it's not that you can't get it,
but without people to do that interpretation,
to have those deliberative conversations,
to have those discussions about what are we seeing,
I think we miss, it's that nuanced opportunity
that you're talking about that help us
particularly then with the more controversial things
that we, that we might be seeing, but importantly,
that help get people engaged around translating,
helping to go from a problem that we can spot
using data to actually developing solutions.
And I think that that's the place that I wanna make sure
that we're also focused, is a lot of interest now
in the use of big data to spot problems.
It's a really great way to know that's where the noise is
or this is where the pollution is, or this is where
the fraudulent charity is, but that's only half
or not even half the process.
It's great to have a better idea, rather than stabbing
in the dark or trying to go from place,
I'll just tell you a story.
I was in Europe last week, and I heard that the Europeans
were considering a regulation to prohibit
the placement of olive oil on the table.
You cannot put a bottle of olive oil
on the table in an Italian restaurant.
You know why?
Yeah, I also had to ask why.
I was like, is this dangerous?
Do I not know something about some death by olive oil?
No, the concern is consumer protection that restaurant
owners will refill the expensive bottle with cheap oil
and thereby defraud you into putting cheap olive oil
on your bread, whatever it might be, and therefore,
the European Union should issue a regulation about this.
So, you could say, and what they would have to do then,
of course, if you have that is you would have to send
a policeman, you would have to send an inspector,
to every single restaurant to go and taste all the oil.
Well, that's a really kind of poor use of resources
when instead, you might have an iPhone app where,
if I go to a restaurant, I could say,
I could, you know, say, the oil didn't taste very good,
and when I get three complaints about a particular place,
then I could send an inspector.
It's a far better way to deal with the problem
than having to issue a blanket regulation about, you know,
the olive oil on the table, you know, 'cause it's great.
The olive oil may be honest, but the schnitzel
that you're eating is made out of cat in the kitchen,
and you have no way to actually know that,
'cause that's not regulated.
I mean, anyway the point is, you can use open data
potentially in ways to target how you deliver enforcement
of solving problems, but you've gotta get people
collaborating around using the data to actually solve
the problem and to come up with new ideas
for how to address it rather than just the data by itself.
-: And again, I'm gonna push back a little bit
on that question about how much data the government
is going to make available, because, 'cause,
'cause the really important problems are problems
that affect politics, and we find,
with the Obama administration that they're pretty
secretive about the stuff that they find secret, and,
I mean, the way they come down on WikiLeaks and all of that,
it's, I think there's a nervous tension that I feel
in the government, and especially, as you said,
a lot of the data's already out there,
and if you think about the fact that data science
is getting better and better and better so that we
can make correlations, we can sort of pull out things
from data even though it's not obviously there,
do you think the government's gonna get to a point
where it starts to kind of swing back
on the open data thing, because they're afraid
that we're gonna use it to hurt them?
-: So you, since you know me, you know that I'm relentlessly
optimistic, hopefully not to the point of naivete.
So here's the positive prognosis,
and I'll give you the negative and the positive.
The positive is that by starting with the release
and opening of data and then productive uses
of that data to solve problems, we begin to inch
more towards a culture of openness.
We begin to convince your GSA lawyer that, you know,
9/10 of the stuff that he or she thought is ours and we
have to hold onto, they may be able to begin to let go.
So there's some, I think, positive developments
of moving in the right direction.
The negative prognosis is, of course, around stuff
that's politically embarrassing, that could be used
to be politically embarrassing, and I think, you know,
at the moment, the prognosis is not good for a whole variety
of reasons that go beyond just the issue of the data piece.
In other words, as long as journalists wanna write
the gotcha stories and wanna write stories about politics,
namely, one party beating up another party
and not about governance and how government works
and how we solve problems, there will always be a move
towards trying to embarrass the other side,
to humiliate the other side, and therefore,
a desire to keep secrets, lest it be used to beat you up
in the court of public opinion.
There will be a desire to hide on the part of people
in the, you know, who are traditionalists,
who believe that it's ours, who are security fanatics
and who don't understand the role that openness can play
in actually helping to bring about better security.
So I think that it's, we have a long way to go to create,
to change how institutions work, to change the culture
of the relationship between media and government,
to change what our conception of government is.
We have a huge amount of, and to change
also the way that we, who's in government
and how we educate the people who are there.
I mean, it's a generational play to think,
to get, you know, it's only the students of today
that are taking courses in data science, in open data,
in innovation, who are then going into government tomorrow.
So I think we still have, this is a long road to hoe,
and we just have to keep at it, and I think combining
the battles that we fight that are the long, slow roads
to get hold of those nuclear secrets or that radiation data
that take years and years to get, combined with the stuff
we can get, you know, in the next 90 days
and do something productive with, I think we have
to work the problem culturally from both sides.
-: It seems anecdotally, from talking to Code for America
and others, that the sort of smaller government sizes,
like municipal governments and state governments,
seem to be more agile and open to this stuff
than the federal government.
Do you find that true?
'Cause I see you working with 10 Downing
and the central government folks, which seem
like it's gonna be a lot more work, but maybe.
(Beth laughs)
-: Glutton for punishment, perhaps.
I think the, again, the cities, cities are,
and the phenomenal work that Code for America does
that's really, that's, it's important in so many ways,
because it focuses on how to deliver better services
to citizens, that improve people's quality of lives,
that work with cities and municipalities where there's
tremendous need that's driving the problem.
So it's, in a way, sometimes helpful to be suffering
from the kind of budget problems that city governments
often face, of how do we do more with less and are
therefore open to and willing to embrace innovation,
and that, where they're really bringing boots on the ground
and sort of creating real change that matters,
but I think it's also equally important to make clear,
you know, Clay Shirky makes the point, there isn't
a Democratic or a Republican way of taking out the trash.
And by that, he means, or I think what he means is that
it's in some ways less fraught, and you're right, easier
to deal with issues like trash removal or service delivery,
but if we don't also tackle those projects and problems
that are the intersection of politics,
that are at the national level,
this kind of innovation or the need for openness,
whether it's for open data or citizen engagement
and new kinds of collaboration, there will be a possibility
that they get dismissed as kind of small, right?
It'll be oh, that's something nice that you can do
in a town, but it's not something we can do.
You know, we can't change how real, serious
government works at the national level.
And I think that's just nonsense, that at every level
of government, in every kind of institution,
and it's not just government; we see this in companies
and organizations and institutions trying to figure out,
how do we open up how we work in order to solve,
how do we get new ideas in more effectively?
How do we spot innovations, recognize them,
bring them to bear to solve problems faster,
and we need to be able to do that in also hard problems
of, you know, like making policy at the national level.
-: Fixing Congress.
Can you fix Congress?
(both laughing)
-: Some problems are too hard for me.
Thank God there's Larry Lessig.
So, I think the, it's a really, I think there's
a really important question that's implicit in that,
and I'd be interested sort of in your reflections on this,
you've been thinking a lot about these questions, is
what many people sort of ask me or focus on is okay, great.
They will talk about, well, it can be done at the city
level, all right, or we can focus on administration,
on bureaucracy, so how we give out grants
or dole out contracts or deliver a service,
but when it comes to the hard core of politics,
what happens in Congress, the truth is, people's base,
base human nature is that kind of partisan rancor.
The decisions will be made on the basis of values
and opinion, and it doesn't matter how many good innovations
or big data or online brainstorming platforms you have;
that decisions about gun control or abortion
or whatever it may be will always be based on values,
and therefore none of this matters.
So, the question is, what's the answer?
So what's the answer to that?
Lemme let you answer it first. I'm gonna ask it of you.
Am I allowed to do that?
-: Yeah.
-: And then I'll give you my thoughts.
-: I have a theory. -: What's your theory?
-: You know, I think that, 'cause I do think
that it's hard to go after the real problems,
especially when they're, when the incumbents are there.
I think there's little moments,
like when you're rewriting your constitution,
or when you've just overthrown the government,
or I think a bunch of our friends
were on the transition committees for Obama.
And so when you're fresh and you're in and you can't do
anything wrong because none of it was your fault, you know,
then that's, that's a good time to try to change stuff.
Once you've been around for a while, it gets a little
bit harder, 'cause a lot of the skeletons are your own.
And then also, the question I specifically,
I don't have the answer to this one, I mean,
but it feels like, 'cause like, I was talking to,
is it Jerry Fishkin who does Deliberative Democracy?
-: Yeah, James Fishkin.
-: And he was, James, James Fishkin, James Fishkin,
and he was talking about a little Chinese city
that asked them to come in to do
deliberative democracy in this Chinese city.
-: Little Chinese city with 20 million people
or something like that. -: Probably, yeah.
But what he said was, it was the local politicians felt
like they wanted to connect more with their people.
And it was this kind of, they wanted to scrub
the relationship with their people
and to show the people that they cared.
And I think when you have a certain amount of political will
where you have that, you have the, you have the space
to be more transparent, to use that as a way to,
and then if you, and this was a long time ago,
and I haven't been in your space for a while,
but I remember, I think in Turkey there was a little city
where the mayor had all of his bank balances completely open
so they could see how much they paid for the car,
and I have a governor who was my friend,
and they were very famous because they were very corrupt.
He put his office in the middle of the lobby
in a plexiglass room with his schedule on the,
I mean, it was just so transparent.
-: That's where you got the idea.
-: Yeah.
Yeah, that's what I did here.
See what I did there?
But, but the thing is, but those are all people
who have a lot of political power, not power.
They basically don't have anything to lose.
Now, it's kind of a chicken and egg, right,
because you wanna use this to fix broken things,
but broken things don't want to be fixed in many cases.
And so I don't, do we have to wait
for Larry to fix Congress before we go there?
-: No, so, I think, well, so, first of all,
I think that the pathway to fixing things
is in many cases opaque to people.
We don't have a model, and this is why I talk so much
and have come to talk about this idea of designing
institutions and the fact that we, 'cause first of all,
is to open up our thinking to the idea that these
hallowed institutions, these traditional institutions
that we tend to think are the domain
of lawyers and policymakers and governed
by constitutional principles are actually
man-made artifacts that we can reconfigure how they work,
that we can take even institutions like Congress
and not only change the financing system,
but change the way, for example, that Congress
gets information and to how it makes decisions,
or whether it's any institution, the kinds of platforms
we're seeing to brainstorm new ideas, to get suggestions
from people, to ask and answer questions.
Right now, we don't have the mental models
in the public sector for what this means.
It's why I always talk about Wikipedia
being extremely important, because it opened
up our thinking to a new way of working,
to the idea that, in a way that people could understand.
I know what it means to write an encyclopedia entry,
so it makes it easier for people
to collaborate around doing that.
If I said to anyone here, let's collaborate around,
let's get engaged with, let's like, do Congress together,
no one would have a clue.
What do you want, you know,
you want me to engage with government?
How am I supposed to do that?
I get the idea of voting.
Maybe there's a small percentage of people
who know something about commenting on a regulation,
but if I ask anybody else here about ways of engaging
with your government, most people would talk about doing
something on a local level in terms of a volunteerism.
Like, I could go sweep up the park, or I could go
maybe into my neighborhood school and do something,
but the notion that I could actually engage in my democracy
beyond voting, we have no mental model of what that means.
So, partly what we need to do is to design
and develop the platforms, and I think
that's where open data is particularly powerful.
It's almost less about the transparency of the data
and more about the fact that it created,
it opened up our thinking to a new way of engaging.
Wow, a hackathon is a new way of engaging with government,
a certain, that kind of hackathon, that didn't exist before
that created a new way for people to engage.
And we need a lot, a lot, a lot, a lot more things like that
and to create the platforms, excited to see Dazza Greenwood
here, who's working in his lab on projects
to really open up and make more visible to people
the state of government records and government information,
but it's without, unless we have that kind of a platform
that makes it visible to people how they can engage
with government information,
just, I'm bastardizing the description here,
to be brief, about what you're working on,
there's no way for me to know what I can do.
I just heard a presentation last week by someone
who's working on a project in the Hague
to actually ensure that every government project there
has this common template to know what is the project,
how much does it cost, what is it supposed to do,
'cause unless I have some basic platforms like that,
there's no way for me to engage.
So, I absolutely agree with your point
that there are moments, those moments of opposition,
those moments of crisis, those moments where change
is more possible than others, but we have to,
we can't wait only for those moments.
We have to be designing and building and demonstrating
creating the models for how we can actually
get involved and bring about that change.
-: So lemme try to repeat this back
in a slightly techno-utopian way.
-: More techno-utopian?
-: So if I were to invoke Lessig here, so, so in Code,
Lessig basically says that code is like law,
and architecture is like politics,
and that every software engineer is making
political decisions with the way they code their work.
And I remember having engineers come up saying,
I don't wanna be political,
and it's like, tough noogies, you are.
And it created this whole sort of generation
of sort of nerd pseudo-lawyers, where all the Wikipedians
and the Creative Commons folks, I mean,
half of them are real lawyers; half of them
are nerds who look at the law from a coding perspective.
And that was what allowed Creative Commons to emerge.
I mean, you know, Aaron Schwartz is a great example
of one of the real leaders in that space,
who was a geek who thought about the law.
And so, if we were to bump that up another layer,
I'm theorizing here now, but are you saying
that then, geeks and nerds will start to look
at the government as if it were a codable thing,
and that by thinking about how to code government,
we can affect government, and that the people
who are sitting on top, just like with the copyright debate,
they're gonna make all kinds of motions,
like I have lawyers and people in Hollywood still,
you know, shaking their finger at me, even though they've
never used the computer before, and it's kind of,
there's a funny parallel, 'cause the gun control people
always tell me that anti-gun people aren't that scary
because the gun control laws they make
usually technology don't work, you know,
and because they don't understand how guns work.
And similarly, I find that a lot of the laws that try
to get implemented by people who don't understand code
tend to be either wrong in a good way or wrong in a bad way.
But, but is there gonna be a point where so much
of government is gonna be technical architecture
that if you don't understand technology,
it's going to be very difficult for you to, say, win,
and that the nerd influence on government will be
like nerd influence on copyright right now?
(Beth laughs)
-: Wow, that is a grand unifying theory of everything,
which is pretty awesome.
The, I think, you know, it already is technical
architecture, but that technical architecture is called law.
And it's a different kind of geekery, and it's
a different sort of vocabulary that you have to master.
But it's that mindset.
It's the mindset of agility that the code,
that the coder, that the coding mentality brings,
the notion that we can actually change things,
that we can hack them, we can try it again
and see what works that I think is somewhat different,
but in both cases, you have this notion of a set
of processes that lead to a certain outcome, and the notion
that we can change what those processes and practices are
so that instead of a decision being made by,
you know, five people sitting behind closed doors in a room.
There's a colleague of mine who is here
who spent some time in the White House.
He, at the time, he was an intern and in school,
and he was tasked with essentially making a very large
piece of national economic policy.
And this struck him, appropriately, as somewhat terrifying,
that he was supposed to design some national policy
on entrepreneurship, and I think,
you know, he was a senior in college.
He'd never run a business.
You know, he was, he had a very fancy,
he had some very fancy degrees and credentials,
but the notion that he, together with three or four other
similarly situated interns, should be making policies
that affect millions of people's lives
struck him appropriately as inappropriate.
And so I asked him the question about how do we
actually open up how we get, at the very minimum,
how do we just get information into how we make decisions,
and the way that we thought about and we took
the patent process, largely because I was an outsider
and not a patent lawyer at the time,
I had to teach myself the subject matter,
was to say, you know what?
The way this has always worked is not the way it has
to continue to work, and that's really the sole difference.
But in the same ways, it's just saying,
these are a set of rules and processes,
and we can change what those are.
I think the one caveat I'll just make is,
it's not about simply a takeover by the geeks;
it's about a blended version of geekery.
In other words, just knowing software, just knowing code
in the left coast meaning of code as opposed
to the right coast meaning of law and policy,
understanding something about what the legal constraints
are, without that blended skillset
or bringing people together from those disciplines,
it's gonna be very hard to actually implement real change,
'cause you can build an app, but getting, as we've seen,
there's a lotta hackathons with a lotta apps,
but getting them implemented into real-world institutions
that fundamentally change practices, we have yet to see.
-: But I think, I still think that my copyright metaphor
would hold, because you have the geeks who understand law
like the Richard Stallman's, and the lawyers who
understand code, who work together to make that bond,
and it seems like if we can get the government,
because if it's true that the government is run
with law as code, we've already figured out
that coders can learn law and lawyers can learn code.
-: Yes.
-: And so then, hacking up one more level
so that the government becomes hackable,
government people learn about coding and law,
and coders and lawyers learn more about the government,
it seems like a natural next step.
-: Yes.
-: And with that, I'm gonna pivot, to be honest,
but I wanted to say one thing about the Media Lab.
So, the Media Lab is very applied.
You know, its uniqueness, impact, and magic,
it has to hit the real world,
and we don't do things for the sake of scholarship.
So we don't like the study of stuff; we like the doing
of stuff that other people might study.
We might study it to figure out how we do it,
but we always have to do it in the end.
And so the media lab has traditionally been
kind of not very full of lawyers or anthropologists
or sociologist or economists, 'cause they tend to study
the phenomenon that we like to build.
But if you're right, and this is my theory that,
and why I want you at the lab, is if policy is now
a technically hackable thing, and that the media,
and Media Lab, by the way, the the way I interpret it
is it's plural for medium, and medium is something in which
you can express yourself, so, if it's true that Media Lab
students could express themselves in law or government,
and that a hack that we build here actually changes
the way government runs, then I think lawyers
and policymakers are welcome to the extent
that they're applied policy, applied government.
And that, that, I think, is kind of the other key thing,
is that I think the Media Lab loves discovering new media
in which we can express ourselves, and I think if we're
kind of at a turning point where the relationship
between science and technology and,
and the government is converging.
I think that's kind of what we wanna
do with you and the Gov Lab.
-: I mean, that's the idea, is this is, as I talked about,
you know, action, what's sometimes called action research
is this notion of applied research that has, in the sense
that we're experimenting, we're figuring out what to do,
we are trying to ask questions about what we're learning
as we're doing it, but ultimately, we have a real normative,
we have a value-based proposition,
which is we care about changing the world.
We care about, and for me, I make no bones
about the fact that I strongly believe that more open
and more engaged ways of working are better.
I have some work to do to prove how to do that
and to actually, but I care about doing that in practice,
about doing that in real-world institutions,
not in theory, but as actually transforming
how our democratic institutions work.
You know, I'm a student of history, and I actually sort
of grew up studying European history of the 1920s and 30s
and the rise of Nazis, and that's actually
how I got interested in all of this, was,
you know, the technology was something I grew up with,
but I was studying history and studying the failure
of democratic institutions in the 1920s and 30s,
how they were not designed right in order to withstand
the forces of economic turbulence and change,
women entering the workforce, economic dislocation
after World War I, and the institutions broke.
They didn't bend.
And so we're now at this inflection point where we see
trust in democratic institutions at an all-time low.
We see, you know, the fact that our institutions
seem totally out of step.
You know, there's a huge divide between what happens
in Washington and what happens here, which is why
every government agency now wants to come to the Media Lab,
somehow thinking that if they set foot in Cambridge,
that the magic pixie dust will fall on them,
and everything will work better.
So there's. -: It's true.
(both laughing)
-: I'm glowing with the dust of innovation.
So, I think there's this moment where we have
where I think it's an important, it's important
that we start to hack our institutions.
And so typically, we've talked about the laboratories
of democracy, but by that, what people have meant,
what policy people and political scientists have meant
is experimenting with different policies.
In Nevada, prostitution will be legal.
In New York, it will be illegal, and we'll see
what the impact is, and we'll study it.
I'm talking about hacking the very institutions
by which we make decisions and solve problems together,
and I think it's just another canvas on which to paint,
and one in which we can have significant impact
and have a lot of fun.
I mean, the fun, because, you know, there's such a range
of areas and projects and problems to work on,
so if what you care about is environmental issues
or another person cares about healthcare and a third person
cares about education, the great part is you can play
with, the institutional questions may be kind of horizontal,
but you can play in lots of different verticals in terms
of working on issues and in communities and with people
to solve real problems that matter, and I think that's
a great place to apply one's design and tech chops.
-: That's awesome.
And with that, so we'll have,
we're gonna give mics to people, because we're gonna
make sure that the webcast can hear it, so.
-: They can see the, hmm.
-: Hello.
-: You said something about our shoes earlier.
-: They are nice shoes.
Good shoes.
-: I didn't wear my cool shoes.
-: I have question.
-: You need new shoes.
-: Earlier today, it was announced, Facebook caved
to some friends of mine who were trying
to get the hate speech off of Facebook,
and I posted a thing about it, and a friend underneath said,
oh, Facebook just wants to do this so they can,
you know, make everyone identify who they really are.
And I thought, okay, well, I don't really care,
'cause I'm everywhere, but then I thought,
in looking at this stuff, if you're talking about people
contributing to governmental things or to anything
or commenting or doing petitions, at what point
do they have to identify who they are?
How important is that to the democratic process?
I mean, considering that we have a history
of people saying, oh, you signed this petition
at a communist rally in 1920,
and so you can't make movies anymore, or whatever.
So how much is that a part of it, do you think?
-: So I think that by itself is a very interesting
design question, is this decision which is, again,
a codable decision about accountability
versus anonymity in different contexts,
depends of course on, and there's lots of evidence
of, you know, how naming yourself or being accountable
or developing a reputation on a platform, whether with your
real name or with a pseudonym, has an impact
on the quality of engagement and participation,
but again, that may be relevant in one context
and not in another, where if I'm in Syria,
or I'm in other places, you know, where anonymity
may in fact be preferable to accountability,
the White House petitions website does require
a form of authentication and, and being named
because it's based on this notion that you're gonna have
more civic and and civil participation, so I think
that there's, this is the one of these great
kind of questions around a place where design matters
and where you can try different things,
and that's where the kind of hacking of institutions,
you know, it gives us the opportunity to try
different things in different ways, to see where
engagement is gonna be most fruitful and most successful.
So I think it's a really wonderful question.
-: And I personally have a strong opinion that we tend
to lean way towards identification,
and that anonymity is extremely important.
I think Facebook's wrong in saying that everybody
will be better if they're known.
There was really interesting work done by people
who are doing this project called Liquid Democracy,
and the idea was basically that, if I thought Beth
knew more about this topic than I do,
I would give her a vote, and everyone would give their vote
to whoever they thought they knew more than they did,
until you ended up with two or three people in the community
who knew the most but were different,
and then they would argue it out or whatever.
But the idea that they had that was really important was
they made it completely anonymous,
but cryptographically secure.
Because what you don't want is you don't want me to say,
Beth, you better vote for him or I'm gonna shoot you,
or I'll sell you my vote for a dollar.
By making it anonymous, Beth can't tell or I can't tell
what Beth voted; therefore, you can't game the system
by creating a way to get paid off or coerced into a vote.
And without anonymity, ballots don't really work,
because it allows the coercion and stuff like that.
And so, so there's a number of reasons,
and then the profiling, all this.
If you trust, basically, to believe that you can do
democracy and public discourse without anonymity
or pseudonyms mean you have to completely trust
the government and you have to completely
trust the people, which you can't.
Otherwise, anybody who wants to say something
is gonna have some sort of fear of retribution,
or there'll be an opportunity to game the system.
So there are always going to be needs for anonymity,
just as there are needs for identification.
-: Right, so that's a great example of a context
in which anonymity is extraordinarily important
in which you can design for anonymity effectively
or try different ways of doing that; on the other hand,
if what I'm trying to do is, for example, right now,
the way the federal government gets expertise is through,
primarily is through, on the administrative level
and the executive branch level, is through what
are called federal advisory committees.
So you have, you know, 50,000, 60,000 experts
who serve in small groups who essentially provide
expertise to different parts of government,
but the notion, there's a whole lot of things
that are wrong with this, including the lack of balance.
Industry, you know, often capture these groups,
the fact that they take many years to set up and to run,
that they can only be small, and therefore,
you lack diversity in the groups, all kinds of things.
So what I wanna do is I'm at the FDA,
and I have a question about pharmaceuticals, or I'm at,
you know, NIH, and I have some kind of a science question,
and I actually wanna reach out to people
in the scientific community,
I may actually wanna know who the people are that I'm
talking to and know something about them and about their
reputation and their credentials and their background,
where authentication and accountability may actually
be extremely relevant to getting or at least
to just measuring and weighing the different advice
and expertise that I get about a technical question
with regard to a pharmaceutical, for example.
So I think this opportunity and ability to design different
ways of engaging, extremely, extremely important, but I
agree with you about the absolute vitalness of being able
to create and manage identity in different ways.
-: I see a hand up there, or somebody, okay, there.
-: All right, it was three years ago this month
that Bradley Manning was arrested, and the government,
of course, is still pursuing Julian Assange.
You were in the administration at that time,
supposedly working for open government.
Did you feel at all ethically conflicted by the government's
response and by the Obama's administration's
continuing efforts to build a very strong surveillance site,
and did you raise these points at all with anyone?
-: Thank God I had left at that point.
(Beth laughs)
So you can ask me, but the, so this was,
so I should say that this was, it was, it was a challenge.
So, here's one of the, one of the challenges is that,
and we continue to talk about this today,
is the naming and the nomenclature of what we did.
So in other words, this came to be known
as the Open Government Initiative.
And I realized only afterwards that it sort of became
this shorthand that we called open government,
and it, and it, and, you know, what I sort of,
you know, the work that I do is focused on citizen
engagement, and what to me was particularly exciting
about the WikiLeaks episode, something that has not
been talked about and taken advantage of adequately,
is the level of engagement and interest that that generated
showed to me a totally wasted opportunity that we had
to engage the American public in talking about
and discussing, in focusing on and working collaboratively
on foreign policy issues together.
You know what, it turns out a lot of people
are interested in this topic.
A totally missed opportunity, that we could have turned this
into a very positive thing in many ways.
So, but the open government nomenclature turned out to be,
and it was to trigger and to be about these kinds
of national security issues where this administration is,
you know, lemme not comment on the politics for the moment,
but let's just say that I, my work focused on and was meant
to focus on ways in which that we brought innovation
and greater agility to the design of institutions
and greater citizen engagement in institutions,
and I came quickly to realize that I was stepping
on a hornet's nest of issues, including the WikiLeaks issue
and other national security issues, detention issues,
Guantanamo, et cetera, that were triggered
by this vocabulary that we should have drawn a better
distinction between so that we could have pursued this
agenda around innovation and engagement and open data
without having to, you know, without having to endorse
any of this other activity that was going on.
So this was, you know, I didn't work in or have any
relationship to, and this work did not have any relationship
to the national security agenda, despite the fact
that it was called the open government agenda.
So, I think that there's, but, you know, from my,
from the take, again, my own view on this as someone
who's focused on how do we redesign institutions
and how do we think about this is that this was
an opportunity, and by the way, something we should
write about is this opportunity to really focus
on how do we create these kinds of conversations.
One of the things that's been,
that's going on in the national intelligence agencies
very much has been the use, at least internally,
of wikis to create better information,
to create a better internal information sharing environment,
and the chance to open up these platforms to get
greater information sharing and to get smarter
about how we do intelligence, I think, again,
is a place that we oughta be thinking
about institutional redesign, but I was not there
at the time for this conversation.
-: Hi, Beth. -: Hello.
-: My name's Chris Peterson.
I'm a research assistant here at the Center for Civic Media.
I'm really excited about the Gov Lab
and all the different issues you raised today.
I'm still not totally clear on what your vision
for Gov Lab is, in terms of a group of hackers,
a group of policy researchers, a think tank.
There seems to be so many great ways
in which Gov Lab can make an impact.
If you had your druthers, your choice,
what would it look like, especially with the relationship
that you are developing here with the Media Lab?
-: What do you think we need to do?
(Joey laughs)
-: There's a lot.
-: I know.
How would you, what's your first choice?
I will, I'm not punting, don't worry.
-: I don't know.
I used to think that the answers were to get more
good people, broadly defined, inside government,
but from my own experiences working in some large
institutions, I can understand a lot of what you described,
and I guess I'm not quite sure myself about how to balance
the power and legitimacy that comes from working
within an institution with the trade-off of the constraints.
And so I'm really kind of at a loss,
not trying to punt back at you.
-: You're completely entitled.
I'm, I'm in the hot seat here.
So I think, so, first of all, lemme say,
we have this wonderful opportunity, and we are now
in a listening phase in particular.
I mean, we're doing work, but we're also trying
to listen to and get ideas for how we can use
whatever limited resources we have
or convening power we have and what are
the different ways in which we can be impactful,
and what also we can catalyze, what messages kind of we
can all communicate about work that needs to happen,
whether we own it or do it ourselves.
So lemme tell you what we are thinking about doing and we're
kind of charged to do with the grants that we have.
So, one thing is is that we have, as Joey mentioned,
we have a grant from the MacArthur Foundation
to think about what it would mean to create
a research network, so to think about it, an action-oriented
research network where we're bringing together
people across different disciplines to think about doing
really two things that I think are really important.
One is to really act as a kind of observatory,
to catalog and to communicate the innovations that are
taking place and how they are impacting real people's lives.
So we need to be telling the stories
about this kind of innovation, and again,
focused importantly on how it effects change
in real people's lives, not just to institutions per se
or creating, you know, greater efficiency in institutions,
but what it means for real people.
So there's a real observatory function.
But the second thing is, what I think
about as a kind of living labs or action lab,
which is what are the platforms that we can design
and roll out, sometimes with real institutions,
sometimes with institutions, and sometimes where we're
catalyzing practices that may be peer-to-peer,
but I am very centrally focused on and believe in that it's
important that we figure out how to work with institutions,
how to reengineer that plane while we're flying it,
because institutions are still the place that,
and if I didn't make this clear at the beginning
with these examples of private sector innovation,
is that the role of government is still about protecting
and preserving the public interest and making,
creating public goods and/or should be about creating
public goods and working toward the common good.
And so this reinvention of institutions,
and I think to be very clear, though, what institutions
mean as new kinds of hybrids that catalyze connecting
people to each other and groups and networks
of publics and citizens with each other, it's gonna
change what we mean from the traditional kind
of bureaucratic practices that we have today, but thinking
about what are those core platforms that we can develop.
So, I would say there are two areas of primary focus
at the moment; one is around creating, is thinking
about these kind of expert community projects.
So how do we get better information in to make decisions
with the basis of better information in institutions?
What's the toolkit we can create to help
ask and answer questions in different ways?
Short questions, long questions, collaboration on documents.
How do we manage the flow of information
between networks and institutions?
So, what I would think of as knowledge communities
is one constellation of platforms, or one platform,
and the tools listed on top of it,
and the second is really thinking about what Danny Weitzner
has nicknamed the No MB project.
OMB is the institution, of course, in most governments
at the state or at the national level here
that is the kind of budget and accountability office, right?
So a program happens in government, and afterwards,
a report is written and sent back to OMB
to say whether the report is working or not,
and Danny, you know, who sits across the seat at CSAIL
says this is a really stupid idea.
We oughta have platforms that throw off data.
We oughta be able to throw off the data that tells us
whether a project is working in realtime or not.
We oughta be able to have also query a project
and it be telling us what its impact is.
We oughta be able to query the data about a project
in realtime and to change what we're asking.
You know, did the potholes on the street get fixed?
How satisfied were people with their experience of engaging?
Whatever the metric might be, we need to be thinking
about measuring what works in new ways, because right now,
metrics, look, we've got lots of proliferating
innovation, and everybody wants to know what works.
And we cannot simply be hiring those consultants
to write the reports after the fact.
We have to have the platforms that throw off the data
in realtime and the platforms that allow all of us
to collaborate in the way that Peer-to-Patent helped us
know how to do, to actually be assessing and evaluating,
using more people to assess and evaluate in realtime.
So I would say expert communities, number one.
Metrics 2.0, number two, and for us, the first two
living lab projects, we have some really great
real-world institutions that wanna play with implementing
what gets designed, but I think what I see us as is
a kind of evolving living lab where that's the project,
those would be the projects for this year,
and then presumably continuing,
and that then we might take on another set of projects
and problems in the next year that might focus more
on peer-to-peer types of arrangements
or, or other sorts of projects.
So I think it's really this, we need to both
be telling the stories and reporting on what's going on,
and we need to be building, you know, developing
these living labs, but importantly, and lemme not forget
to mention, is that we above all need to practice
what we preach and operate in a networked and open way.
So this is not about the Gov Lab owning or some small group
of people that sits in New York or in Boston
doing the projects by ourselves, but it's about creating
a network of people who are working on thinking
about these problems, on mentoring each other,
and on catalyzing these kinds of changes, and lastly,
central to the work that I've done forever
that was partly by necessity rather than by design
was I've always worked with students on everything
that I've done, and so I think that this is about also
training the next generation or sitting back while you
train us in, you know, as the next generation of leaders
and problem solvers is about, you know,
there has to be a mentoring and teaching.
You hate the word teaching, and I agree with you.
What word am I allowed to use?
Am I allowed to use the word training?
-: Learning.
-: Learning, learning environments.
-: Mentoring.
-: Learning is too passive.
There's, we're doing stuff.
-: Building.
-: We're doing stuff and building stuff together,
you know, across institutional, or Sandy likes to say
in an anti-disciplinary way across institutional boundaries,
but I think the learning experience comes from building
stuff with real-world institutions that leads to real-world
change that's not simply academic, but where you
can actually see the real progress in the world.
We don't have time to waste and to wait
to simply do things in the abstract.
We have to really demonstrate and model the change, so.
I think that's my not short enough elevator pitch
on where things are going, but we're
but, you know, we're hacking as we go ourselves
and trying to figure out what that means,
but our two core charges are networked, research networked,
research network, and training, teaching,
learning, academic, next generation problem solver.
Living labs is the output of that.
-: And we'll take one last question.
-: All right.
My name is Ethan Fosse.
I'm a PhD candidate at Harvard.
So, if I were to think of, at the national level,
the three institutional flaws that lead
to a democratic deficit, the three that come to mind
are the US Senate, which,
(Beth laughs)
is a system; it's a, you know, it's an institution which,
a senator from North Dakota represents 250,000 people,
and a senator from California represents about 19 million.
So, that's one institution.
Then another one that easily comes to mind
is the winner takes all system of voting,
which encourages gerrymandering, which is quite common
in the House of Representatives,
and then the third institutional flaw
that I can really think of is voter suppression,
which is really by design in many respects.
Like, why don't we vote on a weekend?
I mean, you could, yeah.
There are all these kinds of efforts
to really restrict voting.
So, my question is, in what ways do you think
technology can democratize these
democratic deficits at the national level?
-: Yes.
So, year two agenda, that's our agenda for years two, right?
So expert community is year one.
Year two, it's these, exactly these kinds of very systemic
institutional design flaws, as you put them.
I think that these are very paradigmatic of the opportunity.
Look, this is, I'm gonna give you an entirely superficial
and unsatisfying response to what I hope
will be a much longer conversation and set of projects,
is to think about what are the ways that we can combine
these different tools, and I view again, left coast code
and right coast code, these are, you know,
just tools in a toolkit where we need
to think about, what are the alternatives?
So Joey mentioned this Liquid Democracy idea,
what the Swedes have called also proxy voting, so this
notion that you could actually redesign a voting system
where you are choosing your delegate.
So instead of your senator, who represents you on the basis
of geography, you could say, this is the person who I wanna
have vote my votes on anything related to the environment,
and this person votes on anything related to the economy.
So this notion of trying to experiment with creating
new kinds of constituencies not based on geography
but based on topic, for example, or other kinds of community
I think are really, really interesting.
I'm excited about the fact that we're gonna have
an opportunity to work with a very significant international
institution that I hope to be able to talk about very soon
that actually wants to do this kind of experimenting.
It's not the US Senate, and in fact, it might not be US
institutions at all that are willing to play in the sandbox,
but I think we have to look globally for institutional
actors who are willing to test different models
and different arrangements for doing things like voting,
you know, making decisions about popular will,
spending money, taking different kinds of decisions,
solving problems, delivering services,
doing things that governments do.
I think we have to offer our services.
You know, Clay Johnson, who used
to head up the Sunlight Labs, has been working
on a project in procurement reform,
and he had the very clever idea to say,
I am shopping for, I will take six clients.
So who wants to be a client of mine,
and I will take only six people who will have
the privilege of working with me.
So I think it's a great idea is you should put yourself
out there to say, I'm, you know, to shop yourself
to the highest bidder, so to speak, with the team of people
who are saying, we're willing to rethink and to redesign
how we do some of these practices.
So it may not be the US Senate first,
but if you can get it done elsewhere and demonstrate
a model of the change and show how it works
and why it works and why it's a better way of doing things,
we begin to create the possibility
of popular momentum around this kind of change.
Power doesn't change itself, and things that are broken
don't wanna fix themselves.
But without the mental model of what's possible,
it becomes very hard to galvanize popular will
and momentum for the change that's possible.
Instead, we shrug our shoulders and think,
this is what, you know, this is, this is what we get,
and we don't deserve any better.
So we have to be able to do something.
-: That's a good ending.
Thank you, Beth.
This was really wonderful.
-: Thank you.
Thanks for having me.
(audience applauds)