CoLab Bericht "Offene Staatskunst" veröffentlicht und Open Data beim Elektrischen Reporter

vor ca. zwei Wochen haben wir die zweite Initiative des Internet & Gesellschaft Collaboratory abgeschlossen und die Ergebnisse der Zusammenarbeit im Bericht "Offene Staatskunst: Bessere Politik durch Open Government?" veröffentlicht. Über 30 Experten aus Wissenschaft, Wirtschaft und Zivilgesellschaft haben knapp drei Monate diskutiert und einen ganztägigen Workshop organisiert, auf dem wir unser Verständnis einem Realitätscheck durch ca. 20 Kollegen aus Politik und Ministerien unterzogen. Das Ergebnis kann sich, wie ich finde, wirklich sehen lassen.

Der Bericht entwickelt zunächst eine strategische Perspektive: Wie kann man (speziell als Politiker und Ministerium) die Instrumente des Open Government nutzen um die Legitimität, die Handlungsspielräume und Ergebnisse seiner politischen Arbeit zu verbessern? Das Kapitel fragt provokant "Wie würde Machiavelli sich des Web 2.0 bedienen um seine real-politische Situation zu verbessern?".

Im zweiten Teil behandeln wir das Thema ePartizipation. Das Kapitel erklärt die verschiedenen Einsatzmöglichkeiten, stellt erfolgreiche Beispiele vor und gibt dem Praktiker eine Reihe von Empfehlungen, die bei der Planung und Durchführung einer ePartizipationsInitiative von Nutzen sein kann.

Im letzten Kapitel geht es dann um einen sehr konkreten Aspekt von Offener Staatskunst, es geht um Open Data. Dieses Thema eignet sich besonders gut als Beispiel, da es den Kultur- und Paradigmenwechsel perfekt verkörpert. Bei Open Data geht es (verkürzt) darum, alle Daten des öffentlichen Sektors (die nicht personenbezogen sind) öffentlich im Netz zugänglich zu machen. Ich finde die Experten haben ein außerordentlich guten Text erarbeitet, der diesen Diskurs aufarbeitet und sowohl die Pro als auch die Kontra Argumente verständlich macht.

Am 25.10 beschäftigt sich auch der Elektrische Reporter mit dem Thema Open Data. Das in dem Beitrag sowohl Daniel Dietrich (Editor der CoLab Arbeitsgruppe zu Open Data) als auch Christian Kreutz von www.frankfurt-gestalten.de, der auch an unserem Abschlussworkshop mit diskutierte, mitwirken, freut mit natürlich besonders.

PS: Selbstverständlich liegen auch die Rohdaten unserer dimap-Umfrage zu Open Gov und Open Data auf der Collaboratory Site zum Download bereit. 

What I believe

During my trip to climb peak Korzhenevskaya I had the great pleasure to disconnect from the information overload and hectic that is my urban life. One of the most gratifying experiences was to read Hans Küng's essay "What I believe" in the base-camp sauna.

I knew about Hans Küng before, but this essay is so well written and conveys his mindset in terms of his most fundamental believe so convincing that I now proclaim myself a disciple and promoter of his approach.

A very short background about Hans Küng: He is a German theology professor, who used to train young men who wanted to become priests. However since he had published a book which doubts papal infallibility in 1971 the church's beholder of all dogmata (Mr. Ratzinger) and Küng have a long dispute. Küng began to focus on Ecumenical Theology and developed the axiom:"No Peace Among Nations until Peace Among the Religions" (1991). Over the last decades a global movement has gathered around this axiom and I can simply say: I very much agree and the efforts of the movement are highly sensible.

In fact, given the abhorrent and very counterproductive analysis put forward under the "clash of civilizations" label, Küng's efforts to find and define a "world ethics", as well as a format for peaceful theo-politics (see e.g. the world parliament of religions) hold, in my humble opinion, the key to overcome the challenge of peaceful religious/cultural co-existence.

So what is the essence of Küng's believe? For him the most decisive force that determines each individual human's struggle is whether or not the man or woman has a fundamental "trust in life" - a positive attitude and believe that things will develop in the right direction. He very savvily substantiates and explains his analysis by building e.g. on the work of eminent psychologist Erik Erikson.

I wont attempt to recount the marvelous content of said essay, but rather (1) point you to his book (first 6 pages of the introduction and first Chapter are accessible via Amazon's "Look Inside" and are the same as in the German essay) or if you read German I recommend you "Denkanstöße 2011: Ein Lesebuch aus Philosophie, Kultur und Wissenschaft" which contains the essay I read.

Some weeks ago I contacted the Berlin chapter of the Küng's World Ethics NGO but so far nobody replied to my email. If you happen to know about a good way to further the cause please contact me.

Breaking Borders Award & Reflections about Freedom of Expression online

This Tuesday Google and Global Voices announced the details and call for nominations for the Breaking Borders Awards, which will honor activists, policy makers and technologists who make a contribution to develop the net as the global forum where netizens around the globe can express themselves and collectively deliberate and discuss ideas. In this post I'd like to share my own take on why freedom of expression is important and highlight some aspects regarding the potential of the net to improve governance and transform social conduct.

On the outset I'd like to set the scope regarding the importance of Freedom of Expression: Nobel economist Amartya Sen famously found that freedom of expression and access to information are fundamental conditions for development. In his analysis, no country in which information is freely disseminated and debated has ever suffered a famine. More broadly, political freedom correlates directly with economic success.

Let me now share my understanding of how internetworked technology advances freedom of expression and societal information sharing/management: One can distinguish between “factual news”, opinion and subjective contextualization.

What happens when reportage comes not from a select few professional sources, but from a multitude of decentralized observers feeding their social networks (and, incidentally, the public)? We see a dramatic increase in transparency—and, through the proliferation of sources, in credibility.

This “reported reality” (from neitzens posting their perspective on Twitter, YouTube, etc.) informed coverage of the recent demonstrations in Tehran and Urumqi. Such reportage will be still more important when, as well as covering breaking news, it brings transparency to institutions like the World Bank and the United Nations Development Program.

The other aspect of ”news processing”—analysis and interpretation—traditionally represented the view of an institution or, at its best, sought to deliver a balanced perspective. In times of blogs, social networks and other means of sharing your views online the information you publish defines your identity and how others perceive you; and it transforms and multiplies the original information.

The virality of information (the way it spreads and changes) has long been exploited by marketers and politicians. With the Internet democratizing information—putting a global publishing outlet and, more recently, a mobile live-streaming camera within every netizen's reach—you can not only globally publish your opinion but debate it. The process can have a substantial, and healthy, effect on citizen participation and decision making, and therefore on governance and societal dynamics.

The real pragmatic challenge however is not in the principle of free speech but in the hairy details of balancing it with other rights like privacy, and defining and deciding on defamation, hate speech complaints, etc.. All nations agree, for example, that child pornography should be banned. But individual governments have decided on highly divergent areas where national history necessitates thematic restrictions on freedom of expression.

If content is legal in one country and illegal in another, how do we foster the net’s potential as a global public space?

In my opinion there can, and should, be no final answer: human judgment and mores inevitably change over time. That is why I think two approaches should be pursued: To encourage the creation of national (and possibly international) expert bodies that transparently identify content which is illegal. And to create multistakeholder alliances like the Global Network Initiative, which has embarked on a step-by-step process to ensure good privacy and free speech practices within its constituents' online services.

Professor Lawrence Lessig warns us that the web—combining software (technological) code and legal (social) code—forms a perfect architecture of control. While we are very successful in building globally spanning internetworked technology on the basis of open standards and simple, liberal rules like “running code and rough consensus,”; we have been less successful at rooting our social code in similarly simple and liberal rules: those that nurture human rights.

With the Breaking Borders award Google, Global Voices and Thomson Reuters are looking for your nominations to promote good practices in freedom of expression online.