How to Make Collaboration Work

In his book “The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations”, James Surowiecki argues that a diverse collection of independent individuals is likely to make certain types of decisions and predictions better than individuals or even experts. Under the right conditions, this principle can be used to improve government decision-making through online participation and collaboration. The conditions that must exist for this type system to work are:

1. Diversity of Opinions - Each person should have some private information, even if it’s just an eccentric interpretation of the facts.
    
2. Independence - People’s opinions should not be determined by the opinions of those around them.
    
3. Decentralization - People should be able to specialize and draw on local knowledge.
    
4. Aggregation - Some mechanism must exist for turning private judgments into a collective decision.

It is obvious that the first three criteria exist naturally within the American population. Our citizens have the greatest level of diversity and independence in the world. In addition, at the federal and state levels especially, we have substantial decentralization, both geographically and philosophically. Technology now makes it possible to efficiently aggregate individual opinions or judgments from thousands of individuals into a single decision. However, the independence of individual views must be protected by first ensuring the substantial and comprehensive transparency of issues. We cannot rely on the media, elected officials, or special interest groups to position issues fairly when they also control information. Everyone must have access to unbiased, undeniable facts so they can form and voice their independent opinions. Otherwise, as they say in the video-encoding business, “garbage in, garbage out” will be the result of any citizen collaboration effort.

If we can achieve true information independence through transparency, there are a number of participation and collaboration models available to government agencies to create productive participation. As the government sets policies and best practices, it should be careful not to dictate methodologies that might stifle innovation and progress in this emerging field. Rather, it should focus on ensuring that the guiding principles will enable the best decisions to be reached. With that said, I would recommend two basic models of participation.

The first is the ability for citizens to make a simple judgment on a proposed initiative or program. This can be easily done by giving citizens the ability to say if they are in favor of or opposed to any particular item and then aggregating this data.

The second method is more difficult, and builds upon the first. This is the ability for citizens to construct and share detailed opinions or proposals for each decision the government is going to make. Again, two conditions must exist to allow for an effective public debate. First, it is important that citizens can base their ideas and opinions on unbiased facts, which is why it is so important to make government data sharable, but not malleable. As Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan said, “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.” Second, it is very important to publicize the schedule for decision-making as part of the public meeting process so all stakeholders understand their window for participation and eventual decision making. Both conditions rarely exist at the federal government level today.