Don Tapscott
Don Tapscott describes how the changing relationship between companies and businesses will be mirrored by that between citizens and states.
Transcript:
CHECKED
Q. Excellent.
A. That is the term and this is the biggest study that has ever been done by the way.
Q. Yes I read it thank you.
A. Great.
Q. It was excellent what you say.
A. It is a essentially action research. We are attempting to discover what is the next model of government and democracy -- the business of government and also the nature of governance itself. Sorry I am just going to take this shine shit off my forehead here.
Q. Go on?
A. We don't have a ideology but we do have a view that democracy is broken and that it can be fixed, you know. If you combine a new medium of communications with a new generation that wants a new model, with this social networking revolution that you were alluding to and then a big economic change to rethink how we get capability for citizens -- you put all those together and you start to get a fundamental new model citizen -- a unique period in human history to me.
Q. Excellent. Could we start perhaps with economics and some of the main arguments if you could perhaps just set up the argument that you made in Wikinomics, if you could just describe that to start with?
A. Sure. Well, because the internet is a global communications system -- I will do it again. Because the internet is a global communications system that enables collaboration, the cost of networking, partnering, collaborating are plummeting dramatically and throughout the 20th century, we created wealth through the virtically integrated corporation. It did everything from soup to nuts and a British economist named Ronald Cose asked asked a deceptively simple question, 70 years ago, in a paper. He said why does the firm exist. If markets are the best mechanism for determining how goods and resources are allocated, why is everybody not an independent contractor at every step along the way of production. And he said the answer is -- and he won a noble prize for saying this -- the answer is collaboration costs. Now he used the word transaction costs but he was referring to the cost of collaborating of search he said 7 years ago, finding all the right people and information to do something. This is totally prohibited in a open market so we brought it inside the boundaries of corporations.
Now what is happening because the web drops collaboration costs vertically integrated companies are unbundling into focus companies that work within networks or business webs and now collaboration costs are dropping so much that peers can come together and create value.
So if you can create a encyclopaedia with a million people who have never met but the quality is just as good as Britannica according to the big study that has been done -- what else could you create. Could you create software? Well the Linux operating system is the dominant operating system for medium and large computers in the world and they have some big customers like China. Could you create a mutual fund -- it is called marketocracy. Could you create a bank, it is called Zopa. Could you create a physical thing like a motor cycle? Well the Chinese motor cycle industry is a bunch of peers that collaborate together.
Q. Could you describe what is happening to the relationship between consumers and producers?
A. Again because the web drops collaboration costs consumers can now produce goods or they can become pro-sumers, as we describe it. So lego found that young people were hacking the software for it its robotics product called lego mind storms and rather than being like the record industry and suing children, it decided to open up its software platform and now there are thousands of software designers between the ages of 70 and four who are creating applications. They turn their consumers into producers and this can happen in every industry.
Q. Why do people want to produce why do people want to get involved in these various industries. I mean essentially it is work people are doing?
A. Well, there are -- as that old television show the naked city said there are six million stories in the naked city and there are six million reasons why people get involved in in these communities. You know a purely volunteer pro bono community like Wikipedia -- people do it because it is fun, because they love to collaborate, because they want to create knowledge, because they don't like the traditional publishing industry, they do it as a hobby, they do it for intellectual stimulation. There are lots of reasons. Same thing is true of something called the Linux operating system, the open source software. People do it for a variety of different reasons but, increasingly, people do it to make money.
Q. Money is not essential in all these things though is it because a lot of these things rely on to some extent in the case of leg or something like that or Wikipedia there is no money in it and there is no formal structure of employment. How are you able to create quality products or services without that type of structure?
A. Interestingly there are actually economic motivators in many of these situations. For example people contribute to Wikipedia for a reputation. Many people do it to put it on their resume and if somebody gives a resume to me saying they wrote 50 articles on Wikipedia that tells me a lot more than they went to Harvard Business School. It says they are motivated, they love knowledge, they love to collaborate, they know how to make things happen in a team, they are people who are -- anyway, you know. Yes.
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Q. That is good, do you think this is... are we seeing a social change here or is it a technological change that is causing this, what is the relationship between the technology and the cultural change, which is [causing] which?
A. We have a unique combination of technological demographic social and economic forces coming together and creating a perfect storm -- your first category six business and social revolution. The new web is not your great uncles internet, you know -- this is no longer about web sites and eye balls and stickiness and clicks and pages. This is a platform for collaboration. We have a demographic revolution. The children of the postwar generation, the baby boom in the United States are the first generation to grow up digital. These kids are different and around the world this is the biggest generation ever coming into the workforce and into the market place and becoming citizens. We have a social revolution. There are 220 people on Myspace and Facebook is growing at close to two million members a week and there is a new blog created every second of the day 24 hours a day and people can now self organise to create communities like never before and you put all that together and you get a economic revolution. This is no longer about hooking up on line or creating a gardening community. This is becoming a new mode of production and it is beginning to fundamentally change the way that we orchestrate capability in society. The way that we innovate and create goods and services and the corporation is going through I think the biggest change of the century.
Q. How did it change the relationship then between the corporations and its customers? Is there an shift in power slightly?
A. First of all, the way we... I will do that differently. The boundaries of the corporation are changing they are becoming more powers and we think of talent as being something inside. Your most precious asset goes up the elevator every night -- everyone has heard this expression. Well talent can now be outside the boundaries of a company. Proctor and Gamble gets half of their innovation through these pools of labour chemists, scientists and so on and that are organised into ideas for us ideagoras. So a talent can be outside. We think of customers as being in sorry -- we think of customers as only being outside the boundaries of companies. The customer is out there. We do market research. We understand our customers. We push products out to them through traditional mass media. Well, now, customers can be brought inside a business web or ecosystem, where customers can co-innovate value and can co-create value. Another thing that is happening is that customers have greater power and that power comes from many sources, none more important than transparency.
Customers at their finger tips have the most powerful tool ever for finding out what is really going on, for scrutinising products and services for informing others and even for organising collective responses. So every company is becoming naked and if you are going to be naked, well, fitness is no longer a option or if you are going to be naked you better be buff -- meaning, you better have good value because value is evidence like never before.
But you also need to have values as a company. You need to have integrity baked into your bones and your corporate DNA because, if you don't, you will be unable to build trust and trust is a sine que non for this network world.
Q. So I mean essentially you are saying the companies are going to have to be better, I do not know how you define that but; they can not rip us off or be mean to us?
A. That's correct. Companies. Well let me put it this way. There has been a expression for a long time that you do well by doing good and I do not think it has been true in the past. Lots of companies did well by being really bad, by being monopolies or having terrible labour practices or having lousy products that they put a lot of money into advertising and sales or by behaving badly in the developing world vis-a-vis the environment or whatever but now because companies are becoming naked, what turns out is that sunlight is the best disinfectant and companies are having to clean up, not because of regulation, they are having to clean up because of market forces and the power of transparency as a new force to change corporate behaviour.
Q. So is there, that does lead us into the discussion about government, is the shift in the relationship between the customer and the corporation going to be mirrored in the relationship between the citizen and government?
A. Well the change in the relationship between customers and companies is mirrored in the private sector. There is a profound transformation which is taking place in the relationship between citizens and their governments. You know governments really grew up at the same period as the the old vertically integrated industrial corporation and we needed layers of bureaucracy -- bureaucracy was a really positive term 100 years ago was the hot new idea in management. We needed to have accountability, protecting of the public trust and the the prevention of patronage and graft and corruption and so on but now what has happened is we have created these somewhat inefficient, hierarchical, vertically integrated government organisations that are inappropriate for the demands of the new global economy and for requirements of a new generation of young people who expect better.
Q. So could we go a little more into that what is wrong with government, why do we need to look into improving it if this system has been developed over hundreds of years- a lot of people think it is very good here and America?
A. I am going to deal with the business of institutions of stuff first and then we can go on to democracy.
Q. Okay.
A. Governments today look like traditional vertically integrated corporations. They do everything from soup to nuts. Now, just as in the private sector we have opportunities to change the way we orchestrate capability, so there are new opportunities to change the way that we get capability to deliver the functions of government or the capabilities of citizenship.
Now, for example, just like we have business webs in the private sector, where companies focus on what is unique to them and build a network to create value for their consumers, so we can have governance webs in the private sector. I will give you an example -- yes I will say that again. Just as we have business webs in the private sector as the new model of innovation and wealth creation, where companies focus on what they do best and they partner to do the rest within a network, similarly we can have network models of government as well. So Neighbourhood Knowledge LA brings together the three pillars of society: Private companies, governments and civil society organisations and citizens and the governments provide unused data about housing code violations, petty crime statistics, school drop outs other data that would indicate that a community is getting into trouble. Then when problems start to evolve you can actually see on a map the changes in the community and people can intervene into the community and fix the problems before we have some sort of big blow up. This is not about outsourcing. It is not about privatisation of government. There is nothing in in the first place to out source, it is about thinking of and developing whole new ways of getting capability to help with society and improving society.
Q. What is the governance web?
A. A governance web is a network that typically involves private companies, civil society organisations and governments and they cooperate together to create value for citizens that no one player can do by themselves. So an example would be the Holocaust Museum for Darfour that you have private companies, you have the United States Secretary of State, you have thousands of photographers and you have NGOs and they all work together on the web, so that you can start up with a satelite map and you can zoom right down into any one of 1400 villages in Darfour and see the devastation that has occurred there.
Q. But what is the sort of shift, I suppose, if you can describe how the government would traditionally work, what are you talking about opening up and changing, what is the difference in what the government is doing?
A. Right now, we achieve capability by putting it inside the boundaries of government organisations. We have employees and they work in government structures and departments with hierarchies and business processes and systems and cultures and attitudes and all the rest. But now, because the new web drops collaboration costs, it is possible to get that capability outside or between governments and other organisations that much more powerful capability can come together if you have private companies, citizens, civil society organisations working on networks with government.
Q. Is that not sort of how things are already, if government is interested in something people always sort of petitioning the government... or lobbying the government is it a big change you are talking about or a slight sort of shift?
A. This is a very profound change. I am not talking about people lobbying government or outside parties influencing government. I am talking about, in some ways, unbundling and reconstituting what is a government. I will give an example on health care: citizens, if you give them the tools, will do a lot of healthcare. Right now we have a paternalistic approach and companies that have -- right now we have a paternalistic approach in societies that have socialised medicine which is that governments deliver healthcare. Well that is a lot better than the free market approach, where you end up as you have in the United States with 50 million people not being insured and the healthcare costs being approaching 20 per cent of the gross domestic product. But we can move to the next step in the more advanced countries. So for example, when I am born, I should get a web site and that web site is my health record and I control the record and I have complete transparency into what happens in the record and of course there are various levels of security but I get access to all kinds of information and tools that will help me so if I have diabetes I will absolutely take responsibility, if you give me the tools for measuring my blood sugar and possibly even changing my behaviour so that I manage my disease better and this is about getting citizens involved and engaged in the whole process of one critical aspect of government which in many countries is health care.
Q. So can you contemplate that if that is happening in healthcare, what happens in other areas and how does that, if that is one the small things you are excited about, how that is going to change the whole system?
A. Okay just give me a second here. New models will are emerging which harness the power of self-organisation. Self-organisation has been around for throughout the human history language has developed to self-organisation. There was no central committee of the English language that said this will be called a hand it just kind of happened but what used to take place over millennia or centuries can now happen in years or over night. So in Katrina, in the hurricane in the United States, governments responded badly and were insufficient to address the crises. So people self organised because they now have a platform to do that and they go on to google maps and they put a little note 'Woman in second floor of house in wheelchair, water 8 feet and rising'. Lives got saved. So we can generalise this principle of self-organisation that now has profound new power and engergy and harness that to transform our societies for the better. Excuse me... do you want to just go on.
Q. Yes yes...
A. In some ways we have a new age of participation emerging... where people can participate in economic activity in ways that were unthinkable. So rather than just creating a site.... I will do that again... jet lag.
Q. You are doing very well.
A. Ha, ha ha, this is a new -- this is a new age of participation, people can now participate in the economy in ways that were unthinkable. So, rather than just reading a encyclopaedia, you can just write one so if you are a teacher in California, rather than just handing up the text book and teaching to it, you can create the text book because the board of education wants to have all text books on an wiki. Now you can fight crime in in your community by doing a mash up of local crime statistics with google maps and you contribute to crime prevention without being a member of the police department. You know, if you are a kid in Mumbai and you have always wanted to go to MIT, you can go to MIT now because they have opened up their course ware. You will not get a formal degree but if you become a hot shot programmer you can then join the top coder network of 140,000 programmers and maybe City Group will hire you to help build some systems at City Group. So you can contribute to the development of the software by joining any one of 150,000 open source application projects. So this is a new age where people get to participate in ways that were not possible in the economy and now this is expanding out to other institutions in society -- that, if we will it, people can now participate in government and become engaged in citizenship in ways that were previously unthinkable.
Q. What about policy you meanings mentioned that in your?
A. Right now the whole model of policy development and arguably of democracy is a broadcast model. It goes like this: I am a politician. Listen to my advertisements and debates then go and vote for me and then I am going to broadcast to you for four years and then we get to do it all over again. You vote, I rule.
Well this model is inappropriate for the 21st century.
First of all, there is a new generation that has grown up interacting and collaborating rather than watching television and they want to be engaged in the democratic process. Also things happen much faster these days and you can not just vote every four years. That is a inadequate way of influencing the course and development of government.
Q. Sorry, wait for the boat...
A. Are you doing all the shots here.
Q. No this is a one off... last minute.
A. No it is okay, it is cool.
Q. That last bit was silent?
A. Yes.
Q. Just the inadequacy of every four years?
A. Well the old model of democracy -- you vote, I rule -- is inappropriate. It is inappropriate for a new generation of young people that want to be engaged and want to interact more than every four years. They don't want to just be broadcast to -- they want to be involved, in the creation of policy, in catylising initiatives in their communities and so on. It is also inappropriate because the metabolism of economy in a society has sped up. Things happen. A greater periodicity or frequency than every four years and there is a role for people to be involved and engaged in an on-going way. Now, don't get me wrong I am not talking about Ross Pereaux and the electronic townhall -- you get to vote every night on the evening news. That is a bad idea, AKA the electronic mob. Democracy is a lot more than majority rule on a nightly basis. One of the things it is about is protecting the rights of minorities. I am talking about something very different where citizens become engaged so a good example is Habitat Jam. 40,000 citizens came together for habitat for humanity and participated in a three day conversation. Now, if we can do in a with 40,000 people we can do it with four hundred thousand -- in fact IBM did at a jam of all its employees and their families over three days -- but we can also do that with four million and I would argue, too, with 40 million. The technology is becoming possible for millions of people to have a conversation.
Q. So what is this system you know it is not that sort of distinction from direct democracy is quite important as well if you could say that?
A. Yes.
Q. And also to sort of go further into.. How do we, if all these people are participating, what if they don't know what they are talking about how do we would out the good and bad ideas, and where is your confidence that this will work take over where we have come from?
A. What was the first part.
Q. Direct democracy this is not just everyone voting for everything it is more complex?
A. So we have. -- we have indirect democracy for some good reasons.
The formulation of policy is something that becomes quite detailed and is very complex and we need to assign people that we trust to do it on our behalf but there are now new ways that broader numbers of people can be engaged in something like policy formulation.
For example the Green Party in Canada created its programme through a wiki where all members of the Green Party could come together just like with Wikipedia and co-innovate and co-create a political programme and it worked out pretty well. In the year 2000, I worked with the White House and we we're going to do a discussion, a five day discussion with America on the internet and the project that president Clinton chose was the digital divide. How do we close this divide between people who have and have not access to the web. That is a big problem and he was very concerned about it and he was going to come on television on Monday morning and say for the next week we are going to have a conversation in America and every day the best ideas will come to me and I am going to participate everyday and at the end of the week I am not sure what is going to happen. This is not about you telling me what to do and it is not about the old model of me broadcasting to you. This is a conversation and I am very confident that we are all going to learn. Intiatives will be catalysed all across the country in our communities in our businesses and so on and we will take a baby step towards a new model of democracy, where citizens become engaged and we are not just passive recipients of the democratic process.
Q. How far then can you define that role of government and what the shift i..., what is your understanding of what the role of government should be according to these new capabilities?
A. Okay just before I do that I will finish on off on your last question okay.
Q. Okay?
A. Of course there are lots of challenges in doing something like this. There will be saboteurs there will be some people that will not not have access to the web and there is the whole complexity of millions of ideas and how these will get aggregated together and the good ones will come to the fore but these are all in the challenge or all in the category but -- but these are all in the category of implementation challenges. They are not in the category of reasons not to do it and the way that good ideas come to the fore is through collaborative filtering, just like when you go on to Amazon and a book is rated it could be hundreds of people that rated the book -- in the case of my books -- but those ratings and the comments about them give you a feeling on whether or not it is a good book and they tend to be pretty accurate.
Q. Can I just ask you one more thing?
A. Sure.
Q. If that is similar... why is the conversation that happens... on Wikipedia with the creation of a article why is that different to a sort of mob rule or a direct democracy type thing....
A. Well the basic model of democracy is that we elected representatives that act on our behalf is a good one and should remain intact. I am talking about moving that to a next generation whereby citizens could be engaged. Not necessarily in telling politicians what to do, although there is a role for referenda and citizen juries and so on but more in providing input and stimulating and getting fresh ideas and getting citizens involved in the process of making a better world and when that happens, when people get mobilised, good things can happen.
Now of course there is always a role for the editor, there is always a role for the final decision maker. You know, if a great publication -- I trust the Financial Times because they have good editors, writers and if they put something on the front page I think that is of value. You know, The Guardian, there are people who trust the Guardian to give them an perspective that is similar to theirs on the world and to provide contacts and to weigh and balance things and we are not talking about eliminating experts, we are not talking about the elimination of authority. We are talking about something much more sophisticated and it is essentially the democratisation of democracy.
Q. So if you could try to just describe the role of government as you see it if government was to if you know government if we sort of had a clean slate almost and we knew the technology we have now... come on helicopter... what should it be doing... what is its role?
Q. This is very difficult?
A. The role of government, well sure I will give you some stuff. Just trying to figure out how to pose it.
So thinking about the role of government you can think about -- when thinking about the role of government it is not a bad analogy, vis-a-vis technology, that the old internet was about the presentation of content that companies created content and they created web sights and they want --
A. You will have to wait.
Q. I think that is very interesting in the way that people are going from this...
A. That is where I was going.
Q. Lets... do you think the helicopter is going to come back again... it seems to be going round... it is going up and down the Thames it might go away go on. Okay lets give it a go?
A. Okay.
Q. All right...
A. There is a good analogy for the new model of government and the role of government in terms of the changes in the internet itself. The old web was about web sites, creating eye balls and stickiness and clicks and page views -- content is king and people created a site where they pushed their content out to the world. The new web is about collaboration. It is about setting a context whereby people can self-organise to create their own value -- I will stop there.
Q. New problem not as bad is it? 321... Okay?
A. So. So the old HTML web site gets eclipsed by the new XML based community. So CNN.com gets eclipsed by blogger.com and Epinions beats consumer reports and Facebook beats match.com and Myspace beats MTV.com and I could give you 50 examples of how the old model is being eclipsed by the new models. In the same way with government. Goverments, rather than doing everything, could more create a platform whereby citizens and others can self-organise to create better value than what currently exists and people will happily do this. People will happily become involved in communities that do good things for themselves and for society. If you create the conditions whereby that can occur.
Q. That is the amazing thing I think, when I look at how businesses are doing it it is amazing that they are doing such a good job of it but government has the most to gain...
A. That is a good point.
Q. the customers of Zopa are mad they are helping each other out with questions they have put in the amazing hard work for the sake of another company without getting that financial reward but if people do that for a company... what is the opportunity there for government would you say... lets wait for this lovely... Fraught with different audio problems in here today.
A. It is rather ironic and even surprising that governments, who originally grew out of self-organisation like language and science have been the slowest institutions to embrace the new potential enabled by the web. You have private companies that are linking up with customers and tying into vast new pools of labour that is self-organised, they are creating platforms upon which people can create value on their organisation. Amazon has two hundred thousand programmes that create value on the Amazon platform but they don't work for Amazon. In the private sect there are miriad of new business models where people are motivated to contribute for financial and non-financial reasons but governments that are perfectly equipped and positioned to harness this new power have been slow.
Q. And why is that do you think what is it that slows them down? something to do with the tradition or the hierarchy that they are essentially organisations that deal with power...
A. It is not surprising in some ways that companies have moved faster because they have the tonic of the market place being brought to bare on every function within an organisation. So initially this was called out sourcing but companies like Cisco that built the network business model there was nothing in in the first place to out source, they just understood that a network can create better value that than a traditional hierarchical vertically integrated organisation and governments have not had that same market place tonic encouraging it to change but now we are at a turning point because 'you don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows' as Bob Dylan said. There are powerful new models now that can create better government and better value for citizens.
Q. And what will eventual make it happen? you sort of touched on people citizens forcing some of these changes. People can do stuff without government now but do you think it will definitely change and if so why....
A. There is a technology push. The new web enables new models and there is a demand pull, coming from the requirements of both the new generation that wants a different kind of government -- that is faster and creates better services and perhaps even costs less and engages them more -- and also from the demands of the global economy for governments to be better and my view is that tinkering with the situation is not going to fix it. We need to make some fundamental changes to our institutions and governments and now is the time when finally there is enough momemtum to be able to do that. Let me just say something else on that, okay? When it comes to the internet many governments are pretty much paving the cow path. You know they create a web site or they put government on line existing business prophecies on the internet or they create portals -- good step forward, one-stop shopping for government. But we can now go far beyond that. We can look at new ways of getting capability on a network to create value for citizens. I will get an example of that. You guys might want to write this up but the current state of the art is government portals -- one-stop shopping -- but with the new web we have these powerful little aplets called widgets and these aplets can go out on the internet to where citizens are, rather than requesting citizens to come to you. So the FBI, rather than saying come to the FBI portal to learn about our ten most wanted has a little ten most wanted widget that goes out and parks itself in a little corner grocery store and in the computer on that store and if the local vendor wants to know who the ten most wanted are, it is there part of that environment. This is a whole new way of thinking about how to use the web to change government services. Rather than asking citizens to come to us, government can become embedded more effectively in the lives of citizens.
Q. There is some kind of distribution of power or authority that goes along with it. I think if government can trust us to to do something with it, because it seems like government is always wanting to control what happens with information, it produces the perfect report it doesn't let you see the research or how they have... now the thinking is that people have let that out, let people see that and let them make their own decisions and with the transparency it is shifting its own responsibility. To what extent is that a good idea and to what extent will it change the relationship between citizen and government?
A. Right now the culture of government could be called a culture of control. Trying to do damage control. We are trying to come up with policies that we can sell to citizens. We are trying to control our fate in the sense of being re-elected and arguably the way to have truly effective control in the 21st century is to let go -- is to move towards a culture of enablement because that is how good things are going to happen. Let me just say something else -- example: we need to better control our security. How do we do that? Well the youngster graduated in computer science in United States and he always wanted to be a spy. He went and worked for the intelligence community in Washington and he could hardly wait to get 7 floors down in the basement to see these billion dollar computer systems. He got down there and found out they were 15 years old main frames that did not do certain things like search. So he started using the internet. He started googling he started uncovering all kinds of stuff. He explained to people what wikis are and what they are and one thing led to the next and pretty soon we saw the rise of this fabulous new capability in the CIA called intelipaedia. Whereby the intelligence community is breaking down the silos that exist to share information and share knowledge. The way to fight bad guys and get better security, it turns out, is through sharing and being more open and ultimately you can see something like intelipaedia opening up to you and I so that we see something strange happening on the street corner or an airport there is a way we can input that information into the system.
Q. So just to sort of finish what do we stand to gain from this new model?
A. Okay well the irresistible force of the new global economy and the new generation that wants a different form of government is meeting up with a immovable object of the current attitudes of governments and -- let me do that again, I am gonna change that all around. The irresistible force to control costs in government is moving up with a immovable object of public expectations of government and what it should be, which is it should be better, not worse. There should be better health care and better education and more security and better transportation and so on. And so we are at a time when some profound change is really required to our institutions of government and the opportunity is basically, first of all, better, cheaper government. But it is also a opportunity for citizen engagement to move to a new model, whereby, when citizens become involved more in society and in democracy and in government, good things happen generally. You get them taking more responsibility for things. You build a community. You get citizens that will take more responsibility for things in their own lives like managing their healthcare, getting themselves educated better and will also be able to create more coherent societies where marginal groups can become involved, can feel empowered and where, together, we can move forward into a new century with societies that basically have greater social cohesion, greater social development and arguably greater justice as well.
Q. What is it called this model does it exist yet how far is it would what would you call it?
A. Yes. A good term for me to describe this new model of government and democracy would be Government 2.0 arguablely the model of government that we have had for the past 100 or two hundred years in some countries is giving way to a new model where citizens are engaged differently and where the relationship between citizens and their state changes -- for the better.
Q. Could you even say the relationship changes from-to?
A. Sure. I call it Government 2.0. We have had a traditional model of government and of democracy that governments do things and we vote and they rule. They are paternalistic and they deliver stuff to us. There's a whole new model emerging where we become part of the government in a sense, that we become engageded in the democratic process. We have input into policy. We collaborate with governments, private sector organisations, civil society organisations in new ways that can create new value for citizens and can improve the quality of our lives as well.
Q. Okay I think?
A. I will give you one other thought why it takes so long if you want.
Q. Yes that would be good?
A. We are describing a new paradigm in government and a paradigm is a mental model and they put boundaries around what we think and they constrain our actions and they are often based on assumptions that are so strong that we don't know that they are there. You know, politicians get elected every four years. They know and we don't. We don't have knowledge. Governments should do things for us opposed to us being engaged in government.
Q. Sorry why is this not just a form of mob rule if you could do that last sentence just what you were saying before that that would be great but it is quarter past now so in we just?
A. Well just really quickly now. There is great wisdom in crowds. There can also be stupidity in mass or mob rule. The whole trick is to set it up properly, where intelligence comes to the fore and we now know how to do that. This is a new paradigm. A paradigm is a mental model and they put boundaries around what we think and constrain our actions and they are often based on assumptions that are so strong that we don't know that they are there and new paradigms cause dislocation and confusion and they are nearly always received with coolness or worse mockery, hostility and vested (?) interest fight against change and that is what we are up against here. A world of new possibilities for new models of government and democracy bumping up against the vernacular in the status quo and this is going to real leadership to bring about a change.
Q. Thank you very much?
A. Okay, my pleasure.
Q. Exciting stuff.
