Toward a Research Agenda on Opening Governance

At the same time, advances in technology and sciences offer a unique opportunity to redesign and reinvent our institutions. Increased access to data may radically transform how we identify problems and measure progress. Our capacity to connect with citizens could greatly increase the knowledge and expertise available to solve big public problems. We are witnessing, in effect, the birth of a new paradigm of governance — labeled “open governance” — where institutions share and leverage data, pursue collaborative problem-solving, and partner with citizens to make better decisions. All of these developments offer a potential solution to the crisis of trust and legitimacy confronting existing institutions.

But for the promise of open governance, we actually know very little about its true impact, and about the conditions and contingencies required for institutional innovation to really work. Even less is known about the capabilities that institutions must develop in order to be able to take advantage of new technologies and innovative practices. The lack of evidence is holding back positive change. It is limiting our ability to improve people’s lives.

The MacArthur Foundation Research Network on Opening Governance seeks to address these shortcomings. Convened and organized by the GovLab, and made possible by a three-year, $5 million grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Network seeks to build an empirical foundation that will help us understand how democratic institutions are being (and should be) redesigned, and how this in turn influences governance. At its broadest level, the Network seeks to create a new science of institutional innovation.

In what follows, we outline a research agenda and a set of deliverables for the coming years that can deepen our understanding of “open governance.” More specifically the below seeks:

• to frame and contextualize the areas of common focus among the members;
• to guide the targeted advancement of Network activities;
• to catalyze opportunities for further collaboration and knowledge exchange between Network members and those working in the field at large.

A core objective of the Network is to conduct research based on, and that has relevance for, real-world institutions. Any research that is solely undertaken in the lab, far from the actual happenings the Network seeks to influence and study, is deemed to be insufficient. As such, the Network is actively developing flexible, scalable methodologies to help analyze the impact of opening governance. In the spirit of interdisciplinarity and openness that defines the Network, these methodologies are being developed collaboratively with partners from diverse disciplines.

The below seeks to provide a framework for those outside the Network — including those who would not necessarily characterize their research as falling under the banner of opening governance — to undertake empirical, agile research into the redesign and innovation of governance processes and the solving of public problems.

At the same time, advances in technology and sciences offer a unique opportunity to redesign and reinvent our institutions. Increased access to data may radically transform how we identify problems and measure progress. Our capacity to connect with citizens could greatly increase the knowledge and expertise available to solve big public problems. We are witnessing, in effect, the birth of a new paradigm of governance — labeled “open governance” — where institutions share and leverage data, pursue collaborative problem-solving, and partner with citizens to make better decisions. All of these developments offer a potential solution to the crisis of trust and legitimacy confronting existing institutions.

But for the promise of open governance, we actually know very little about its true impact, and about the conditions and contingencies required for institutional innovation to really work. Even less is known about the capabilities that institutions must develop in order to be able to take advantage of new technologies and innovative practices. The lack of evidence is holding back positive change. It is limiting our ability to improve people’s lives.

The MacArthur Foundation Research Network on Opening Governance seeks to address these shortcomings. Convened and organized by the GovLab, and made possible by a three-year, $5 million grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Network seeks to build an empirical foundation that will help us understand how democratic institutions are being (and should be) redesigned, and how this in turn influences governance. At its broadest level, the Network seeks to create a new science of institutional innovation.

In what follows, we outline a research agenda and a set of deliverables for the coming years that can deepen our understanding of “open governance.” More specifically the below seeks:

• to frame and contextualize the areas of common focus among the members;
• to guide the targeted advancement of Network activities;
• to catalyze opportunities for further collaboration and knowledge exchange between Network members and those working in the field at large.

A core objective of the Network is to conduct research based on, and that has relevance for, real-world institutions. Any research that is solely undertaken in the lab, far from the actual happenings the Network seeks to influence and study, is deemed to be insufficient. As such, the Network is actively developing flexible, scalable methodologies to help analyze the impact of opening governance. In the spirit of interdisciplinarity and openness that defines the Network, these methodologies are being developed collaboratively with partners from diverse disciplines.

The below seeks to provide a framework for those outside the Network — including those who would not necessarily characterize their research as falling under the banner of opening governance — to undertake empirical, agile research into the redesign and innovation of governance processes and the solving of public problems.

The Network has identified two lines of research that, taken together, can radically transform our understanding of how to open governance most effectively, and represent a new science of open governance:

1. Collaborative Governance –Explores how governing institutions can open themselves to diverse participation and a wider range of expertise so as to improve decision-making.
2. Data-Driven Governance –Explores how governing institutions can leverage quantitative evidence (including big, open and small data) to improve decision-making.

In what follows, we describe in detail these two focus areas, including strategies for operationalizing them in the short term, as well for creating synergies to inform the creation of a new science of open governance.

I. Collaborative Governance

Central Themes: Collective Intelligence, Cross-Institutional Collaboration, Expert Networking, Incentives for Co-creation and Participation, Citizen Science, Open Innovation

Hypothesis

When institutions open themselves to diverse participation and better coordinate efforts with other stakeholders, governing decisions are more effective and legitimate.

Background

Participation can manifest in a number of ways: we participate explicitly in our democracy by voting, by mobilizing around political and social issues; and implicitly by volunteering in our communities and perhaps by responding to the occasional opinion poll. Citizens also participate in our collective life by, for example, adding or editing articles on Wikipedia, writing hotel reviews on Tripadvisor, restaurant reviews on Yelp, or book recommendations on Goodreads. Similarly, citizens can participate in difficult and specialized projects — e.g., transcribing the works of Jeremy Bentham or ancient Egyptian papyri — that contribute to our collective intelligence and knowledge.

Yet even as we have made it easy to participate in these various ways, there exist only limited avenues for citizens to share their know-how with government or help build governance institutions. In some cities, citizens can draw attention to civic problems like potholes or a lack of public services. But for the most part, we have no systematic way to engage the expertise, experience, and passion of people who want to help solve public problems — whether those problems are as global as the prospect of a flu pandemic or climate change, or as local as the need to improve trash collection and build bicycle lanes.

To date, crowdsourcing has been seen as a vehicle for amateur participation rather than as an effective and legitimate way to engage those with deep expertise and wide experience. But there is an emerging realization that people have, and more importantly that they are willing to share, expert knowledge. Expert crowdsourcing can help identify who knows what, and what kind of experts provide the most reliable and relevant contributions to address different kinds of problems and questions. In addition, and unlike the information glut that often results from traditional crowdsourcing, the tapping of distributed expertise can serve as something of a filtering mechanism, helping to curate more reliable, specific and useful information for decision-making.

Of course, catalyzing effective collaborations requires more than simply finding the right people to participate. In many cases, interested, expert individuals and organizations are already working toward solutions to big public problems; many of these experts are known. The issue we need to address is not a lack of expertise, but a lack of meaningful strategies and pathways for distributed and diverse experts to co-create solutions. Technology enables collective action in civil society, for example by helping individuals route around bureaucratic logjams. Efforts to make governance more collaborative and participatory can look to the countless civic groups already using new communication and information-sharing tools to promote political action, mobilize an opposition movement or spur community activism. Giving individuals and groups the ability to collaboratively participate in the functioning of governance and co-create solutions could serve to amplify impacts and enable more fluid and coordinated efforts.

Research Network Actions

We are only at the early stages of recognizing this power of collaboration, and of learning how to harness it. We believe that this is one of the most important tasks confronting the Network as it seeks to extend its research and better understand the mechanisms of open governance. In order to deepen our understanding of collaborative governance, we propose four main categories of activity:

1. Mapping the field of Collaborative Governance Research: To inform ongoing and newly developed research projects associated with collaborative governance, the Network will articulate and map collective governance themes. As part of this mapping exercise, we will ask several key research questions, including:
   • Does targeted, smarter crowdsourcing (or expert networking) yields higher quality participation than open-call crowdsourcing? Is a hybrid of the two most effective in some cases?
   • What kinds of incentives best catalyze participation?
   • How can different actors in the same space best be encouraged to collaborate? How can experts working in separate disciplines develop a common vocabulary to enable knowledge sharing and undertake collaborative work?
   • How can new, technology-enabled opportunities for initiating change be communicated to engineers and others capable of acting on those opportunities?
   • How can institutions be re-designed to become more collaborative?
   • What are the ethical implications of fostering collaborative governance, particularly in the form of public-private partnerships?
2. Joint action research projects: The research questions will be addressed (and answered) through a core set of collaborative action research projects. Several of these have in fact already been initiated, and have already begun to yield insights. These include:
   • Collective Intelligence in Healthcare — an ethnographic inquiry into the healthcare needs and habits among patients in the UK.
   • Data Science Expert Network – a platform for collecting and making searchable the skills, experiences and interests of data scientists so that they may be used to create new opportunities for participation in efforts to address public problems.
   • DCENT — a Europe-wide project creating privacy-aware tools and applications for direct democracy and economic empowerment.
   • Distributed Internet Governance — the exploration of tools and techniques for improving Internet governance and, subsequently, informing the development of a roadmap for 21st Century distributed global governance.
   • Fostering Collaboration Between Fire Departments — developing pathways for distributed fire departments to share knowledge and better coordinate responses to emergencies.
   • Harvard Ether Dome Challenge — a prize-backed challenge undertaken at Massachusetts General Hospital seeking to determine the optimal incentives for participation in crowdsourcing projects.
   • Open Government Network of Innovators — the development and study of an expert network connecting government innovators around the world to enable knowledge sharing and targeted requests for information.
   • Smarter Crowdsourcing at the FDA — testing the effectiveness of expert networking in the staffing of regulatory review panels of medical devices.
3. Building a curriculum for collaborative governance: An important objective of the research network involves translating research findings into training materials and interactive courses to educate the next generation of game changers. For this part of our research, we will work in collaboration with a number of existing institutions and organizations, including:
   • Center for Policy Informatics: a translational research hub at Arizona State University that advances the study, teaching, and practice of the nebulous field of policy informatics to address complex public policy and administration problems.
   • Nesta: an innovation charity with a mission to help people and organizations bring great ideas to life.
   • MIT Media Lab: actively promoting a unique, antidisciplinary culture, the MIT Media Lab creates disruptive technologies that happen at the edges, pioneering such areas as wearable computing, tangible interfaces, and affective computing.
4. Interdisciplinary convenings and knowledge exchange: The Network will also seek to bring together experts from diverse fields and disciplines to share findings and actionable insights for research into and the fostering of collaborative governance. A number of convenings and meetings have already been planned. These include:
   • Academy of Management 2015 Annual Meeting organized under “Opening Governance” theme (Will take place August 7–11, 2015 in Vancouver)
   • Collaboration with the Social Labs Community to share best practices and develop new initiatives with those working on the front line of governance innovation (First meeting will take place in July 2015 at Nesta, UK).

The surfeit of data has led to three concurrent developments, each of which is providing opportunities to improve the functioning of governance and the lives of citizens: