Roger Cohen, a columnist for the New York Times, had a great article this week that was titled. “It’s the Networks....” when describing the success of the O’Bama campaign in raising funds. The essence of the article was more true than probably even Mr. Cohen realized.

Evolution in government is not so much about how social networks are going to change government. There is a big difference between using social networks for campaign fund raising and using them in participative democracy. Evolution is much more about understanding how to identify networks that can be leveraged for information aggregation in a way to improve the quality and efficiency of specific governmental processes.

The United States government was founded on principles of deliberative democracy and the framers of the Constitution debated at length the proper roles of citizens and their representatives as wonderfully described by Cass Sustein in his book Infotopia (recommended reading). So in a sense, the fact of citizen participation is “nothing new”.

On the other hand the technology revolution and specifically the Web is changing the calculus of information aggregation for government. The old technology - meetings and public hearings - is being replaced with new technologies that enable participation without physical presence.

But the way that technologies are used, the framework of reason, network, and method is the linchpin to successful aggregation of information for government. As Sustein accurately reasons, deliberative communities can be very powerful for the good, but they can also go very wrong. When technologies are used in the wrong way, or maybe with the wrong expectations, they can actually exacerbate problems in deliberative processes where citizens and network participants are exposed to social fear and information biases.

This podcast examines layers of innovation for how government aggregates information, and further considers, very broadly how government agencies can develop a framework for leveraging networks that they have taken years to build and support. Some of those networks may be with citizens, others may be with stakeholder groups, or professionals, knowledge experts, or perhaps other jurisdictions.

The layers of innovation include:

1. (1)Historical public meeting and public comment structures.
   

2. (2)Email collection.
   

3. (3)Portal based public comment collection. (centralized).
   

4. (4)Web based public comment structures with moderation, reporting, attribution, identity, and validation. (decentralized).
   

5. (5)Collaboration technologies for closed networks and working groups.
   

6. (6)Social media and social networking tools.
   

The framework includes consideration of reason for public participation:

7. (7)Have to.
   

8. (8)Want to for legitimacy.
   

9. (9)Want to for added value and reaching best possible decisions.
   

10. (10)Want to for efficiency.
    

11. (11)Want to for inclusion.
    

It also includes an identification of network support and engagement to serve the governmental purpose. Networks that will yield the most value will be different in both nature and scope depending upon the nature of the challenge. The method used to reach into and support, or participate in each network will vary and depend upon the reason that your government agency is trying to leverage the network.

Finally, when government agencies authentically believe in the value of engagement, in other words, they believe that they can reach out and gather information that will make a difference in their decision making processes, then those agencies will have to consider behaviors that are very different than historical behaviors - many of the new behaviors learned social networking and social media companies.

They will consider what it takes to achieve social attention of citizens, including the inclusion of novelty, habituation, creation of clear expectations, building trust, and all of those behaviors that encourage and invite engagement. These are not within traditional skill sets of many government institutions - but they could be.

It really is about the networks as Roger Cohen suggests. And we are just getting started!

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/26/opinion/26cohen.html