4 Big Debates at the Paris Digital Week 2018
Although digital technology has been around for quite some time, as we realize more its political implications, the debate for its future pathways becomes a collective matter, rather than a technical one. Last week’s 2018 version of the Paris Digital Week showed exactly that, hosting three parallel events that dealt with the intersection between technology and governance: the GovTech Summit, the Internet Governance Forum and the Paris Peace Forum. I had the opportunity to attend to the first two and, after participating in a couple of sessions, distinguished four debates that are giving form to the evolution of governance through and of digital technologies.
Most of the opinions and ideas presented here are not my own, but a collection of the interchanges between speakers and with the audience. These four debates do not exclude the existence of others (e.g., the implications of artifitial intelligence), they are just the ones I am most passionate for.
Common, private or public driven governance?
The increasing use of technology to solve public issues has opened a new market. The GovTech Summit was partially about it, with many startups and old enterprises presenting their services and participating in the panel discussions. As Public (leading organizer of the Summit) proposes, their mission is to help tech startups capture the $400 billion global market, that might grow to a 1 trillion dollar by 2025. It is big and it will have an enormous influence around the world delivering the tools to run the public sphere; nonetheless, this poses questions of governance: what direction and criteria would the sector follow in its development? How will we guarantee that open and democratic standards will be preserved?
Is great to have a sector capable of growing through the delivery of public value. But we should be cautious if we look at similar cases, like the field of smart cities. Smart city technologies have been criticized for being more about tech consumerism and for even endangering democracy. There is always a thin line between value creation and value extraction. The Civic/GovTech sector (check here a nice proposal to differentiate them) should be radically different. But will the market model be the suitable driver for its development? Markets are good at maximizing financial profit, but not necessarily at maximizing public value.
This is why the governance question becomes so relevant. In fact, we are talking of something bigger than an economic sector. Civic Tech is a movement and a promise. Govtech is the opportunity for a closer and more efficient State. Much of the initial developments and experimentations have been the work of communities and groups of independent citizens who see technology as a mean to reduce intermediation and improve social coordination. Market mechanisms are efficient for scaling, but the commons have framed the scenario for creation.
Paula Forteza proposed at various conferences that we should maintain a multi stakeholder approach (already present on the internet), exploring financial mechanisms that prevent market failures, that open codes and knowledge, that allow more experimentation and innovation from citizens. Businesses and startups do play a role, along with NGOs, independent citizens, local and national governments, IGOs, and specialized communities (like civic hackers). Innovation, growth, and management are not the exclusive task of profit seeking institutions, other sectors with different incentives can be active participants and not just spectators and consumers.
In such a scenario, the real question will be about the rules of the game. Even if the vision is clear and shared, we will need a common understanding of the ethical and political limits of certain actions, as well as compliance mechanisms. Will governments be the ones who design the rules? Governments can easily become an owner, often prisoner of their own bureaucracy, with incentives to concentrate power. But as Andrew Rasiej said in the Civic Tech panel, this all is about shifting power.
All participants coincided in the panel on the need to deconcentrate from governments the delivery of public goods. It was curios, though, that they were skeptical of the public sector but not of businesses. Me neither, if we are talking about a dynamic interaction of small businesses and not big corporations to whom even cities lay down. Recognizing the possibility of market failures is not easy when the spirit of a new industry is at its youth. “Do we want a business model based on democracy?”, asked Paula Forteza. I think we could bear that, as long as accountability remains in the core. The commons-based approach is about this, mutual accountability, verification of compliance and enforcement.
Decentralization or the tyranny of structurelessness?
The question for governance demands another question for the means to achieve it. There is much enthusiasm these days with blockchain’s decentralization utopia: if intermediation (and the activities done by bureaucracies) could be automated, we could be one step closer to build a society free from oppresing actors. Blockchain is highly valued because of its potential to become a mean for better governance. The issue, as was highlighted during the Blockchain for Social Good session at the IGF 2018, is that today we are discussing blockchain’s theoretical potential benefits, but they are not being matched in practice.
Blockchain is a powerful tool that has constituted as a new political and digital paradigm. In fact, it can be said that the appearance of cryptocurrencies marks an after and a before. The financial boom (and decline) of bitcoin and many other cryptocurrencies has begun a period of less emotion and more real work. The development and growth of blockchain has opened the possibility to dream of creating a new construct using this technology, beyond currencies.
Nevertheless, we are in a point where it is not clear if we should be debating about blockchain’s governance, or governance facilitated by technologies like blockchain. Is blockchain going to be the future driver for democracy? Given the present state of cryptocurrencies, blockchain as it is poses doubts. It is not yet clear if this technology is taking power out of existing power structures (central banks, for example), but reconstructing the same top-down model in the digital space. In fact, what we could be facing is the tyranny of structurelessness (alluding the famous paper written by Jo Freeman in 1971 after the author’s participation in various feminist movements that called for a “leaderless, structureless (…) organizational form”), where new unaccountable and unrecognizable elites appear. Take as an example how the unknown creator of bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto, apparently owns enough bitcoins to be among the richest persons in the world (with bitcoin’s peak prices of late 2017).
Could these new systems be resilient to entropic movement towards centralization? How can this resilience be achieved? What speakers on the blockchain session agreed on was that we cannot avoid political problems with these tools because there are persons behind them. We must differentiate between tools, technology and processes. Processes cannot be replaced by technology and tools, that are static. What are the mechanisms to build the processes we want? That is a question we cannot leave to technology and will have to answer politically.
“Participation-washing” or the real power of the crowd?
The “Citizen Participation and Collective Governance” session at the GovTech Summit discussed, among other things, “participation-washing”. This occurs when a decision-maker opens a process for participation of stakeholders, but his ultimate decision remains closed. It is a common strategy for legitimizing a public decision that otherwise will lack support. For example, one needs to be skeptic if someone argues about the collective character of a decision just with the number of participants involved.
In the tech world we find more references to “open-washing”: building a façade of openness (saying, for example, something is open source or open data) when there is not. But contrary to participation, the concept of openness is clearer and better defined. For instance, we can know if a dataset fits well the criteria for open data (see the 8 principles of open government data). It is also possible to find similar checklists for open source projects. But the question for participation is not jet clear. Today there is not a common definition of what constitutes a participative process, nevertheless, we keep on using it one time after another.
Participation is at the heart of civic tech and is precisely because of this that we should think about it in more quantitative terms. Today almost no one will question the merits of participation, but is it possible to measure it? How much participation is required in a political process for it to be considered democratic? What percentage of a decision should be left to the public and what to the formal authorities? Who is exactly the public that participates? Do we want tools that just count votes and aggregate opinions, or tools that facilitate consensus building? These are the questions that matter when building a civic tech. If they are not answered explicitly, it is possible that what is shown to us is just a legitimizer.
Nonetheless, being sincere about participation is valuable these days. Some processes (or parts of them) are not fitted for participation and publicly recognizing it is fine. What ‘the public’ might be seeking for is clear and transparent rules, rather than a fake story just to please a democratic narrative. Nevertheless, being transparent implies facing the critiques and opposition that might come if arguments are flawed. After all, as said by Quentin Sauzay from ECHO, “more democracy is not a technical problem but a political issue”.
It all comes down to procurement
Democratic dreams require technical and financial resources, that is a fact. Civic and govtech will not appear from nowhere, nor will communities develop technologies autonomously without someone paying the cost. The growth and evolution demand oxygen and leadership. In this evolving context, governments are crucial actors with the mission, the people and the resources to make civic and govtech thrive. As discussed in the “Innovation from within: the role of government intrapreneurs” session at GovTech Summit, many breakthroughs have been the result of an active participation of government intrapreneurs. Not for nothing Mariana Mazzucato wrote The Entrepreneurial State, where she documented how the risks and funding of basic research for many sectors have been financed with public money.
However, as it happened during the session, any discussion about innovation within the government keeps on bumping with procurement. Procurement policies in most States have been made for certainty, they create processes to find the best cost-efficient offers and secure the delivery of what was bought, normally measured in specific products. But this is problematic at least in two ways. First, in a rapidly evolving context of digital technologies these processes are too slow and tend to be doomed to miss opportunities. And second, they are neglecting the very essence of innovation, that requires experimentation and iteration.
One key message highlighted in the session was that governments should learn to fail in small amounts. Is this feasible in the present context? Normally not. ‘Bureaucracy hackers’ have found paths to achieve this and adopt procurements practices that allow greater flexibility for the final unknown products of an innovation process. The problem comes with making this systematic.
I will add that the biggest challenge in procurement would not only be the development of new techniques (see for example existing good practices like OECD’s Public Procurement for Innovation report) and the adaptation to the heterogeneity of legal systems, but the change of the role of government from an institution that buys for its own needs, to one that invests in common goods. Public money is the only big financial source capable of investing systematically in non-excludable goods and services, from urban mobiliary, to open source software and open patents. Remembering the first debate in this article, it will make all the collective sense to push for something like this, but will it be able to resist the bureaucratic incentives to concentrate power?
Paris Digital Week showed that there is not a single shared vision of governance of and through technology. Driving development towards a socially valuable situation will require consensus building, a better recognition of the present debates and positions, and more active participation of stakeholders. It was clear that the evolution of digital technologies is a political issue and entails debate, preparing for different scenarios and bigger appropriation of non-tech actors.
