Towards Open Statecraft

Berlin.
The second keynote at the Berlin Symposium this morning is by Philipp Müller, who will argue for the idea of ‘open statecraft’ in a networked world. He suggests that our world has become ‘unfiltered’ through the move from mass to networked and social media; the appropriate description for this is not simply many-to-many or few-to-few media, but n-to-n media, where all sorts of power games in pursuit of communicative impact, visibility, and success take place.

There are also some cognitive lags here – we’re missing a framework that allows each of us to work in these worlds, much as we once learnt, slowly and with difficulty, to live in the industrialised and mass media worlds. Historical analogies are 1386 – where lances as a military technology were first used to undermine warfare based on mediaeval knights, and in the process undermined the knighthood system overall; 1518, when Martin Luther became the first blogger, using the new technology of the printing press, and a church door, to initiate some 150 years of governance crisis; and 1927, when Bertolt Brecht pursued ‘radio theory’ and considered the development of audience-driven backchannels to radio as well as theatre plays.

The overall argument is that new technologies and new thinking lead to a changed social logic. What, then, is the situational logic of the present moment; how does it intersect with human and machine nature; and what theories of action may apply to this new environment?

How do we organise, strategise, and live in networked world, in other words? Benkler’s work on commons-based peer production works against Ronald Coase’s view that companies will tend to grow and become slower; what Coase' couldn’t foresee was the virtualisation of organisations, however, tending towards the minimisation of transaction costs. Similarly, companies move from strategising their positioning in the commercial world to an ecosystem design approach; leadership models change from a ‘commander-in-chief’ style to community facilitation by open knowledge community leaders.

Politically, the challenge is one of open statecraft, then. How do we even speak about statehood in this world? One tool to examine these questions is the strategic triangle of public value (which is what states, but also other actors create), legitimacy (both at input and output levels – legitimacy based on participants, and/or on outcomes of the processes), and capacity (of both citizens and organisations): how do we create public value in our networked environments?

We need to consider the policy cycle here – from agenda setting through policy formulation, implementation, and to evaluation, and back to the start – and its stakeholders (crowds, experts, data, citizens, as connected and facilitated through various online platforms); or the value chain, which is more than simply open innovation but considers all stages along the way (input, process, output, and outcome).

What would Machiavelli say about all of this, Philipp asks – he understood that we needed a different logic to get things done in the modern world, and today may point to the three key layers to be considered: strategic (how to design open value chains from research and development to final outcomes), operational (how to designate community managers and leaders to facilitate community growth and development), and technical (how to design simple and functional platforms and interfaces). Each of these layers affect the success and failure of participative projects; all of them are necessary but not sufficient to utilise openness in strategic ways.