Jimmy Breeze's personal annotations on this page
Chrishp bookmarked
on 2009-05-07
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Although political legitimacy demands accountability to an
electoral process, those living in a democracy readily submit to what
sociologist Michael Schudson calls the "permanent embarrassment" of
expertise. We believe that administrative governance by a professional
elite is the best way to organize decision-making in the public
interest. -
The justification for this professional decision-making,
articulated by theorists ranging from Max Weber to Walter Lippmann, is
that while citizens can express personal opinions based on values, they
are incapable of making fact-based decisions on matters of policy. -
Only institutionalized and
governmental professionals possess the expertise, resources,
discipline, and time to make public-policy decisions. -
And citizen
participation is hard to organize and administer, and even harder to
scale. It is one thing for 10 bureaucrats to debate a policy and come
to an informed consensus; try getting the same result with 10,000
people–or 10 million. -
Now, however, new technology may be changing the relationship
between democracy and expertise, affording an opportunity to improve
competence by making good information available for better governance. -
Ordinary people, regardless of
institutional affiliation or professional status, possess
information–serious, expert, fact-based, scientific information–to
enhance decision-making, information not otherwise available to
isolated bureaucrats. -
Partly as a result of the simple tools now
available for collaboration and partly as a result of a highly mobile
labor market of "knowledge workers," people are ready and willing to
share that information across geographic, disciplinary, and
institutional boundaries. -
Wikipedia is open enough to allow expertise to emerge,
but it is also structured enough, with outlines and to-do lists, to set
the rules for a certain kind of group collaboration–and that
collaboration is producing high-quality results. -
Or take sites that utilize self-reinforcing "reputation" systems to
improve quality and reliability. -
Making expertise
relevant for the complex processes of policy-making also requires
forming communities that can collaborate, but it goes beyond that. It
demands "civic networking," tools designed for groups to transform data
into knowledge useful to decision-makers, as well as the concomitant
institutional practices designed to make use of that knowledge. -
Political philosophers from Aristotle to Rousseau to Rawls have
suggested that when groups engage in the public exchange of reason,
they produce better ideas. In practice, however, more talk usually
slows decision-making and comes with the attendant problem of
groupthink. Increasingly, however, we are discovering how to use
computers to enable deliberation without endless talk and without
having to be in the same room. And those structures–enforced through
software–are what transform the subjective, free-wheeling, dynamic
expertise of amateurs into effective communities of experts. -
For example, the Omidyar Network, the philanthropy launched by eBay
founder Pierre Omidyar, asks the public to participate in awarding its
grants. -
Or consider New Assignment,
which was launched to demonstrate that "open collaboration over the
Internet among reporters, editors and large groups of users can produce
high-quality work that serves the public interest, holds up under
scrutiny, and builds trust." The site set forth the social practices to
elicit collaborative reporting (instead of collaborative
gossip-mongering), resulting in the publication of seven original
essays and 80 interviews, as well as a series of stories about
collaborative journalism for Wired
magazine. -
Similarly, the Sense.us program at
the University of California–Berkeley provides public mechanisms to
allow people across disciplinary boundaries to collaborate in making,
and thereby making sense of, census data graphs and charts. And the
United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) is taking this idea
to the next level: connecting experts directly to actual
decision-making in the "Peer-to-Patent" project. -
This has
particular application to policymaking: Non-governmental participants
have something more to offer than voting once a year–namely, good
information. -
If we can harness the
enthusiasm and knowledge of "netizens" to the legal and political
processes generally reserved for citizens, we can produce government
decision-making that is both more expert and, at the same time, more
democratic. -
The Problem with Experts
In his award-winning book On Political Judgment, social
psychologist Philip Tetlock analyzed the predictions of those
professionals who advise government about political and economic
trends. Pitting these professional pundits against minimalist
performance benchmarks, he found "few signs that expertise translates
into greater ability to make either ‘well-calibrated’ or
‘discriminating’ forecasts." It turns out that professional status has
much less bearing on the quality of information than we might assume,
and that professionals–whether in politics or other domains–are
notoriously unsuccessful at making informed predictions. -
And more
participation does not mean better participation. How should
administrators deal with individuals who carp but offer little useful
information to improve decision-making? Or interest groups that
electronically submit tens of thousands of identical "postcard
comments"? -
Scientific peer review provides an alternative mechanism for
oversight and quality control.
This link has been bookmarked by 11 people . It was first bookmarked on 26 Dec 2007, by someone privately.
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Although political legitimacy demands accountability to an
electoral process, those living in a democracy readily submit to what
sociologist Michael Schudson calls the "permanent embarrassment" of
expertise. We believe that administrative governance by a professional
elite is the best way to organize decision-making in the public
interest. -
The justification for this professional decision-making,
articulated by theorists ranging from Max Weber to Walter Lippmann, is
that while citizens can express personal opinions based on values, they
are incapable of making fact-based decisions on matters of policy. - 17 more annotations...
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if designed with clear,
simple tasks -
elicits specific, structured, and manageable input, not from
individuals, but from collaborative groups - 3 more annotations...
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Jean ShankleA Journal of Ideas
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Michel Bauwensthe computer screen can shift power from professional sources of authoritative knowledge to new kinds of knowledge networks.
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Howard RheingoldHow open-source technology can make government decision-making more expert and more democratic.
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