Democracy-as-a-Platform-Strategy
Not all internet platforms are made equal; the technologies that power them share functional similarities, but the value they create, the interactions they foster and the experiences they provide to end-users are fundamentally different and so is their underlying operational ‘business-logic’. With the evolution of the internet and the rapid growth of online businesses, the word ‘platform’ has caused a lot of confusion. In this article, I will clarify some of the common expressions we hear when platforms are discussed in the context of the internet. I will then demonstrate why online government services such as Gov.uk and its successors do not match the template of other successful internet platforms just yet – and what consequences this has on our democracy. After all, not all technologies are equally democratic. Lastly, I want to explore and share with you briefly the idea of an authentic Democracy-as-a-Platform with shared owner rights, which can scale and reform democracy at speed. Let’s start by exploring the terminology of an internet ‘platform’.
Platform-as-a-Service
A Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) is a category of cloud computing services (data centres available to many users) that provide a platform allowing software engineers to conveniently develop, run, and manage applications without the complexity of building and maintaining the infrastructure typically associated with developing and launching an app or online service (Wikipedia). The term PaaS describes well the type of technical– and, in some way, the operational–framework that runs Gov.uk and all its 200+ digitized, administrative services. With Gov.uk, the big idea was that the United Kingdom (UK) government departments and partner agencies should not have to reinvent the wheel each time they build a new digital online service (source). Developers who work for the UK government refer often to the term PaaS or SaaS (Software-as-a-Service). Now, PaaS is not the same as an Internet Platform Business; although they share technical similarities, their success is due to different operational strategies. Why is that?
Internet Platform Businesses
Before the internet was born, it used to be that all larger organizations or businesses were somehow enclosed entities and the value creation took place within their own four walls; from products to services, shoes to software, hotel beds to taxi rides, from lending money to running educational programs for the public and so on. Traditional business organizations produced, packaged and distributed their value creations to the markets and the consumers through a well oiled one-directional, linear supply chain.
There was a clear distinction between creators and consumers. Because all value was created and controlled inside the ‘business’, growth relied heavily on human capital, access to resources, physical location and the ability to innovate and automate some of the production and distribution stages.
The internet changed all that. The most successful businesses today are internet platform-businesses. Such businesses replaced 50% of the top fortune 500 companies just within the last 10 years and, in my view, they will also help modernize democracy; but more to that later. These internet platform-businesses are built on network effects and harness online/offline communities and (web-)technology (PaaS) to scale at tremendous speed. They demonstrate the most online user engagement and manage to elicit the most interactions, transactions, and conversations we currently can observe on any web-based platforms. Platform-businesses are built on three design principles:
- The definition of a key value unit (e.g. ride, stay, news & insights, video, music, food, delivery, etc.).
- An effective way this value unit gets produced/shared/exchanged between two or multiple parties/users (community strategy).
- An online platform where all this can happen.
How Platform Businesses Work
UBER, Airbnb, Etsy, Alibaba, Medium, Kickstarter, eBay, Kaggle, Stackoverflow, News Deeply, etc. — they are all examples of successful internet platform-businesses most of you are familiar with. Today, however, I would like to introduce you to a less well-known organization and ‘platform business’ known as ‘The Good Judgement Open’ (GJOpen), and explain how it works. The reason why I chose GJOpen, is because it demonstrates best, on an operational level, how to orchestrate effectively collective human intelligence, inclusiveness, participation, engagement and empowerment through platform technology.
The GJOpen is basically an open online platform that harnesses the wisdom of the crowd to forecast world events. This community of amateur forecasters regularly outcompetes the US Intelligence Services (16 agencies, $50 billion annual budget) in competitions and forecasting events. It does so by leveraging the same design principles and building blocks of modern internet platform-businesses such as UBER, Airbnb or Alibaba. The core building blocks of The GJOpen are:
- An open community/network of producers (amateur forecasters) and consumers (news agencies, government bodies, insurance companies, etc.) of information and forecasts.
- A set of tools and regulations that allow the community to effectively interact, create, share and exchange value (forecasts).
- Data to share and help match community members and interpret the quality of the value creations.
Anyone can join the platform, pick a forecast challenge and provide their best ‘bet’ on future events. The tools and features of the platform help you control your input, guide specific interactions and connect you with other community members for cross-pollination and inspiration. This community of amateur forecasters votes on and creates their own challenges and, quite often, special interest groups propose additional challenges to a large ambitious online community.
The US Intelligence Service essentially does the same thing — forecasting future events — with a key difference; value in form of insights gets created inside the constraints of their own walls, following a linear and cumbersome slow process. Network effects happen, but they are weak and short so important insights, reflections, and conclusions stay within secure meeting rooms, protected by a political elite and a group of well-paid civil servants.
So what makes internet platform-businesses so successful, compared to traditional business models and organizations, such as the US Intelligence Service?
- Successful platforms remake the pipeline value chain, adding value creation outside organizations.
- Successful platforms are open, allowing regulated participation among multiple participants and harnessing fast growth through multi-sided network effects.
- Successful platforms scale much faster because they distribute the cost of value creation more effectively and they provide frictionless entry of creators and consumers.
- Successful platforms facilitate three kinds of exchange: information, goods/services and currency.
- Successful platforms perform three crucial functions well: pulling, facilitating and matching.
- The most successful platform businesses make valuable 2-way interactions easy for a large number of users. Quite often the role of producer and consumer merges.
Government-as-a-Platform (GaaP)
As you learned, Gov.uk is built on the technical principles of PaaS, but it does not share the operational commonalities of an open and modern internet platform-business like The Good Judgement Open, nor does it leverage the underlying design principles and business logic. The production of meaning or sensemaking of the data Gov.uk centralizes (public cloud), is still interpreted step-by-step, inside ‘pipelines’, that sit sealed behind government walls, organized around the needs of government rather than those of the citizens. The UK version of GaaP feels more like the US Intelligence Service with a few public data APIs and a user-friendly UI attached to it, orchestrated and administrated by clever entrepreneurial technocrats spread across multiple government departments throughout a country.
Gov.uk is perhaps most comparable to Apple’s App Store, with the main difference, that all ‘app creators’ – aka digital service creators – stem from the same organization – the UK Government; a selected technical elite, that follows the same rules, works with commonly modernized, but restricted tools, and obeys a now standardized (digital) execution strategy or the most recently set political agenda. Gov.uk is being maintained with a predefined, time-boxed budget. Network effects happen between departments and individual civil servants (e.g. OneTeamGov), but not in the same way GJOpen leverages them between all the participating parties that engage equally on their platform. Gov.uk is not truly open and cannot benefit from network effects adequately to scale or solve problems at high speed, nor can it be called democratic in its nature.
Government-as-a-Platform describes the technical framework to help policy people, front line staff, service managers, permanent secretaries and ministers work more effectively across departments so they can deliver puplic services at improved convenience for citizens with diverse needs (source). It does not transfer more governing power to the people but instead, it automates services and manifests powerstructures and gives control to even fewer, technologically fluent politiciants.
Gov.uk in its current form is a tool to precisely help the UK government and its 385 departments execute policies and administer its political agenda more effectively and at low cost. It is interested in policy delivery but not policy creation. As Louise Downe, Director of Design and Service Standards for the UK Government said: “Most of the government is service design most of the time.” I agree – so is Democracy. Although Gov.uk feels more just like a digital marketplace for administrative government services. It’s Bureaucracy 2.0 or Institutionalized Technology. But if you, like me, see the government as primarily vested with a policy-making function, don’t you think that this whole ‘digital transformation’ has left the UK government fairly untransformed and unchallenged?
“All the [political] parties right now are faking it. They are putting together platforms that they hope some people will support, rather than finding ways for their policies to be cocreated.” Ed Saperia
The success of Gov.uk is measured internally in uptime, service transactions, user satisfaction, and the 1700 million pounds and paperwork it saves every year for the UK government, but not for its citizens. In that context, Gov.uk is a true (business) success and an outstanding achievement since it managed to bring around ~430,075 civil servants (March 2018) on the same page and under one web domain. It failed, however, to spread the same unity and harmony to the wider UK society. Just look at the number of informed public citizens in the UK, which, in some estimates, has decreased by more than 50% from 2014 to 2018 (source). Trust across all UK institutions has remained flat and stable since the 2012 launch of Gov.uk. The lack of a true citizen engagement strategy on behalf of the UK government is a testament to that. Perhaps, a mobile strategy would have unleashed the digital power the government needs to establish trust, get help, distribute responsibility, increase participation, engagement, empowerment and strengthen democracy. More on that later.
In light of the above numbers, it seems, Gov.uk is following strictly the rules of a capitalist service economy — guided by behavioural economic rationalities. Their digital strategy piece reads like a pitch deck for venture capitalists from Silicon Valley, with the aim of disrupting public service where citizens are being turned into monetizable users.
This very strategic framework has helped the platform fail to become a real tool and driving force for democracy, despite Mike Brackens counterclaim. The Brexit Referendum partially surfaced this dilemma. Neither the Gov.uk nor the Parliament.uk website provided touch-points, features or digital services that helped prevent citizens sleepwalk into the abyss or stopped ruthless trolls from openly lying to the public about what the decision to vote Leave might actually entail. On the other hand; neither the Gov.uk nor the Parliament.uk website helped our governing parties to better team up and sift through the mess the Brexit referendum left us with. So, what needs to change?
It is not about better data collection or promoting more transparency. It is rather about creating a ‘tool’ to leverage collective intelligence effectively.
Democracy-as-a-Platform
Above, we discussed platforms and what they are from a more technical perspective such as PaaS and SaaS. We also looked at modern platform-businesses that use the internet to rapidly build communities that can facilitate the creation and exchange of goods, services and most importantly collective insights and information. If we now combine these two ideas – platform tech and biz logic – we perhaps can already think of solutions that help us govern society more effectively, cogitate collectively, produce more equal outcomes, increase peace and freedom along the way. Perhaps, we can reach a point that allows us to question the necessity of our current political system and replace or enhance it with a more effective, informative, educational, participatory and collaborative ‘system’ that includes all citizens, leverages their collective memory and intelligence to craft better decisions, policies and outcomes for the benefit of our whole society, not just the few.
Radical change means replacing politicians and bribable civil servants with data and independent decision making ‘systems’ that cannot be corrupted, undermined, bribed, influenced or physically shut down.
The parliamentary democracy we currently have in place does not allow the people involved – politicians and civil servants – craft the right policies at speed and scale nor do they oftentimes seem to have the human cognitive capacity to establish empathy for our complex and diverse cultures and the broken environments we live in. We need the effectiveness and the technical and operational logic of Internet Platform-Businesses to allow large groups of people, perhaps all citizens of a country, to productively think and interact at scale to solve local problems – but mostly – our rapidly increasing global issues. The end result of this goes far beyond direct democracy – a model that has proven to also produce semi-sufficient outcomes (example).
“It seems to me that the real political task, in our contemporary society is to criticize the workings and institutions, particularly the ones that appear to be neutral and independent and to attack them in such way that the political violence […] will finally be unmasked so that one can fight against them.” Michel Foucault, 1971, Justice vs. Power
Volunteer technologists, data experts, political scientists, lawyers, thinkers, tinkerers and doers around the world are already working on ideas and solutions. We see good progress from countries like Taiwan, India, Spain (Madrid), France, Brazil, Germany, Romania and Iceland. Governments around the world (link and link) are starting to use digital tools to engage citizens, having a say on budgets or counteract fake news. Pol.is seems to be able to establish some early traction amongst the more popular platforms. Still, all these initiatives are niche, deployed infrequently and sit on top or alongside an outdated political system: These haphazard, complementary interventions cannot introduce major structural changes. Better data, won’t change that either. The solution can only be radical, political and structural (system-)change.
Hacking Democracy
Since the 2008 economic crash, most countries across the west have seen a marked increase in public protest. If not the government, others will use this momentum and available platform technologies to radically reshape our political landscape and influence the way we govern and shape policies. In 2008, we have seen Barack Obama use successfully existing online platforms to recreate and enhance the momentum he gained in the streets to win his US presidency. Eight years later, we were passive bystanders, when autocrat Rodrigo Duterte exploited existing social media tools with organized patriotic trolling to win his Philippine presidency, destabilize the economy and weaken democracy. Not to mention what data and platform tragedies presented us with Trump and Brexit the same year. Our governments need to go beyond developing just pure and slick administrative digital services; they need to think about how democracy in the 21st century works; how it can be established and stabilized for future generations.
I hope my thinking will inspire a few civil servants out there to branch out in a different direction, so they don’t just have to follow UK’s Government Digital Strategy or political leaders with a big budget but no vision. Instead, they should feel motivated to seek alternative and more ambitious solutions that not only provide excellent administrative services for citizens but help build a democratic system that is ready for the challenges of the upcoming decades and an always on, always connected civil society – ready to take the momentum off the streets into productive policymaking.
Recommended reading list
- IF…THEN – Algorithmic Power & Politics, Tania Bücher
- The People vs. Democracy – Yascha Mounk
- Superforcasting – The Art And Science Of Prediction, Philip Tetlock, Dan Gardner
- Platform Revolution – How Network Market Are Transforming The Economy…, Geoffrey Parker, Marshall Van Alstyne, Sangeet P. Choudary
- The People vs. Tech, Jamie Bartlett
- A Private Sphere, Zizi A. Papacharissi
- Platform Capitalism, Nick Srnicek
- Opening the Government of Canada, Amanda Clarke
- Future Politics, Jamie Susskind
- Capitalism, Socialism, Ecology, Andre Gorz
- Republic Lost, Lawrence Lessig
- Democratic leadership and mass manipulation, Theodor W. Adorno
Recommended Links:
- The GOV Lab – http://www.thegovlab.org/
- NESTA – https://www.nesta.org.uk/government-innovation/
- Oxford Internet Institute – https://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/research/digital-politics-and-government/
- Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law — https://cddrl.fsi.stanford.edu/
This article is going to be part of a series of blog posts about the idea of a Democracy-as-a-Platform. I want to tackle some of the (design) challenges of digital and future democracies. The series reflect my deep interests in networks, the public sector, politics, cultural studies, behavioural economics and digital platform design. In my 2nd part of this series, I will plan to outline the architecture of a DaaP.You can hire me for your next research session or design sprint. Please connect with me on Linkedin.
