My first reaction, when preparing the presentation, has been: again? I have been presenting about what it is, how it matters, what to do about it for the last 6 years. Is it still an interesting subject? Can I go on repeating the same presentations?

So what new approach could I take?

First thing, I wrote to a friend who’s supposed to attend about his expectations, and he said:

• What is it?
• Why did it develop so fast?
• What are the benefits for citizens, business and government?
• What is next?

So I thought well after 6 years of research, it’s a good time to have a long-term historical picture. To put social computing in perspective. So the title is “Social Computing: taking the long view”

The structure is as follows:

- what is social computing and how it is moving into “serious business” science 2.0, enterprise 2.0, gov 2.0

- its deep roots (Engelbart’s augmenting concept)

- its impact (positive and negative)

- its future (implicit web, web squared, gamification, making sense of data)

The final concept is that social computing is there to stay, that there is still much room for innovation, but it’s doubtful that Europe will lead on this unless changes are implemented.

So I recommend not to have a dramatic and high-profile “Horizons 2.0″; but a gradual and significant change in terms of openness, framework conditions (e.g. science career), and how research is funded.

What do you think? What are the key concepts you think should be conveyed?

• it focusses on the policy-making activity of government, while in 2011 I focussed on service delivery
• it focusses on the whole policy-making cycle, not only in policy design as it is often the case in eParticipation
• it stands firmly between the two extremes of (maximalistic) direct democracy and (minimalistic) social media PR: it’s about leveraging collective intelligence for better decision making
• it concerns a wider range of ICT solutions than collaboration, extending to policy modelling and simulation, visualisation, opinion mining, data-intensive tools

First, I will continue working on the online engagement of the Digital Agenda for Europe, with Richard Wilson, PAU Education and Laia Pujol. This is exciting and promising.

Secondly, the CROSSOVER project will develop the research roadmapping work of 2010 in the CROSSROAD project and bring it at the global level.We’ve already launched an active Linkedin Group, and created a dedicated podcast channel (click here to subscribe in iTunes).

To do so, we are now seeking 5/6 animators (pdf) for leveraging conversations and collectively define the future of policy-making. The ideal profile is:

• knowledgeable about one or more of these technological areas
• well connected in the research and practitioners community, also through social media

It’s a low-quantity, high-quality job. If you’re interested, follow the guidelines in this document and submit your proposal by January 25th.

Yet from personal experience we know how positive it is to share knowledge. It leads to progress, better discussion, meeting interesting people, and visibility gains. I blog because I like it and it helps me to share early ideas with others, but then it turns out this is also a great way to gain a reputation.

Interestingly, this is the reverse of Adam Smith invisible hand, which states that “individual ambition benefits society, even if the ambitious have no benevolent intentions” (from Wikipedia). We could say that “collaboration benefits the individual, even if the collaborative person has no personal gain intentions.”

-       Tim Wu. The Master Switch

-       Robert Levine. Free Ride

-       Jaron Lanier. You are not a Gadget

-       Douglas Rushkoff. Programme or be programmed

As I read them on my beloved Kindle, I am happy to share my favourite excerpts: My Clippings.

In particular the first two provided me with a refreshing consideration of the issues of copyright and net neutrality, and with many contrasting feelings.

The first consideration is that the debate over copyright and net neutrality is ultimately an issue of industrial policy. It’s government somehow deciding which sectors of the economy should be priviledged.

There are 4 economic sectors involved:

1. Content industry (possibly divided between authors and publishers such as RIAA);
2. Internet companies (such as Google);
3. Telecom (divided between incumbents and new players such as Telecom Italia and Tiscali); and
4. Consumer electronics (such as Apple).

Decisions over net neutrality and copyright law affect each sector. Basically each sector is in favouring of opening up the other layers. Telecom favour non-restrictive copyright since free content drove broadband uptake and are against net neutrality; Internet players and consumer electronics favour net neutrality and low copyright enforcement; content industry favours strong copyright and net neutrality.

This leads to shifting alliances, particularly unstable since the actors continuously change position in the value chain (see the cooperation turned competition between Apple and Google).

Government decisions are based on various criteria, oscillating between political opportunism and genuine evaluation of societal benefits, and between robust evidence and popular wisdom.

At best, government decide based on overall societal benefits. Where can jobs and growth be created, in the long term? Are they generated by web companies, protected through “safe harbour” provisions and loose enforcement of copyright; or by protecting the content industry and making sure it is not wiped out by piracy?

This leads to the demand for evidence about the economic impact of the web: how many jobs are created? How many jobs are destroyed in the content industry? In the long term, does stronger copyright protection stifle innovation, by allowing legitimate services such as Spotify to emerge, or hinder it by lowering the freedom to experiment of services like Youtube? The same goes for net neutrality.

Obviously the direct economic impact is not everything: you then need to consider creativity, cultural identity, democracy and free speech, quality of life, indirect economic impact such as a better educated workforce.

At worst, government decide based on political opportunism. Who is better at lobbying between Telecom, Content industries and Internet Companies? Telecoms have certainly the strongest fire power, but Google has recently increased significantly its expenditure in lobbying. In addition, Google is effective in making look like its interest are the interests of democracy and free speech, while Telecoms are effective in claiming their importance based on number of employees.

Overall, I came out with a less ideological vision. It has confirmed my previous impression that the decision not to enforce copyright was largely an industrial policy decision in favour of telecoms, aimed at promoting the uptake of broadband.

More in general, I am no longer convinced that copyright enforcement and laws like Hadopi are bad and it’s clear to me that free music is not a basic human right. There is a legitimate argument that web companies and telcos are hijacking revenues previously going to content producers, and that these content producers start to lack alternative business model to justify production. Piracy hurts Spotify as well as Sony Music. It is true that open access is still without a sustainable business model; that newspaper are being destroyed by the decision to make their content available on the web. And evidence about the economic impact of the web, as I previously argued, is not robust – but the same went for ICT. This is why I particularly liked the take of Neelie Kroes in her latest speech, which focussed on “Who feeds the artist?”

I have no final answer, and I very much enjoyed two opposite positions such as Wu and Levine. I am now more aware that my previous web-friendly position that dismissed the content industry as old-fashioned and “not fit for the web” was superficial and somehow driven by sympathy rather than evidence. At the same time, I remain not sympathetic with the telecom industries position, which seems to deter innovation and be overly influential in policies.

I think this discussion is crucial, and I now realize how important government regulation is to steer the industrial development.

But most of all, I want to thank Wu and Levine for the high quality of their arguments.

To encourage the organisation of prizes, the Obama administration has promulgated the America Competes Act to simplify and streamline the organisation of challenges by government, and to allow any agencies (previously only DARPA and few others could) to organize such challenges.

I wonder whether in Europe there are similar barriers to the large scale adoption of prizes as innovation policy measure. For instance, I know that in Italy there are specific burocratic obstacles to the organisation.

Do we need a “Europe Competes” Act, and why?

In that September 2007 I presented 5 case studies, analyzing their deployment and impact. It is worth looking back at them today to check what happened to those 5 cases. We all know that emergent gov2.0 services easily appear and disappear, making them as innovative as they are unreliable. I expected most of them to have disappeared or quietly closed down. This would not be necessarily negative, as certainly they would have spurred learning and innovation with much lower investment than traditional large scale government IT projects.

Instead, I was surprised to consider that:

- PatientOpinion continues its activity, has been copied by the NHS, expanded in new areas such as mental health and in other countries such as Italy

- Intellipedia has just celebrated its 3rd anniversary, it has become a fundamental working tool with an average of 5000 edits per day

- A small, developer led website such as MyBikeLane, born out of the rage against badly parked cars has expanded worldwide (16 members for example in the city of Antwerp)

- Peertopatent has expanded to Japan, Korea and Australia, and soon to the UK

- ePetitions is still very much up and running

So ALL services are still running and have expanded internationally. Quite impressive. To put this in perspective, they are more reliable and long-lasting than Google Wave or Google Buzz.

I remember those days spent at evangelizing people about gov2.0. Then came Obama, and everybody followed.

Today gov2.0 is everyone’s priority, but it’s good to see that, beyond the hype, it has delivered solid and long-lasting services.

This is surprising to me. In a study we carried out for DG INFSO earlier this year, it came out clearly that developers dont make much money out of apps. They say that it’s good to be visible towards venture capital, but in terms of money they’re better off selling their services to companies who want their apps, rather than selling them directly (see for example this article and this).  A recent book by the most respected scholar on the economic impact of ICT (Brynjolfsson) paint a very careful and nuanced, if not negative, picture.

I am not an econometrician but the Maryland study looks weak to me. It is 7 pages long, so that it does not seem a study but some back of the envelop analysis.

The main doubt I have is that it seems to calculate as impact of Facebook app any job created by companies that at any point in time have created an app in Facebook. It states “We excluded 13 firms, such as Blizzard Entertainment, Electronic Arts, and Yahoo from our sample because we could not identify the proportion of Facebook induced full‐time employment.” How could they establish the Facebook-induced full time employment for any other company?

The second doubtful statement says: “The number of employees of each firm would be a function of the number of developers and the number of active users” . This appears to link employees to the number of user, as if developing an app for 15 users requires less manpower than an app for 1M users. Why? The very basic competitive advantage of the web is that is allows to scale at very low costs.

Based on this statement, it formulates that the facebook app economy has generated more than 50K direct jobs.

Another puzzling issue is that it mention passingly that only few apps are for pay, and that you pay with “credits”. But then, these credits data are not used in the estimation.

Another important statement is about the multiplier effect:” For the industry “Internet and other information services,” RIMS states that for the most populous state, California, the creation of one job leads to 3.41 additional jobs in California alone.” This is far more important evidence  that the overall app economy study. There is robust evidence that Internet multiplies jobs more than other industries such as communication.

In summary, my impression is that the paper:

1. calculates the total number of developers in companies that have ever created a facebook app, and attribute this number exclusively to the app
2. multiplies this number by some factor related to the number of users in order to deduce employees, to arrive at 50K.
3. It then multiplies this total by the (somewhat robust) multiplier of 3.41 to obtain 180K.

Steps 1 and 2 are strongly flawed in my opinion.

But I am no econometrician, I don’t understand the formulas. So far I have only seen news article about this study, and no serious academic discussion. It seems to me one of the classical cases that with complex formulas and general equilibrium theory we can justify everything.

So here I call all economists:

- can you point me to serious discussion of this study?

- do the calculation make sense?

In particular, IT skills belong to a small minority of the population, largely composed by cultivated young men.

Instead, specific knowledge is much more distributed, but still belong to an elite: not a technological elite, but a knowledge elite which is far more equitably distributed between gender and age. For instance, people writing on Wikipedia include many more women and elderly (as stated by Wikipedia Italy manager Frieda Brioschi at the recent Wikitalia event in Rome).

Finally, the other points are far more equally distributed among the population. Almost anyone can contribute through their trusted networks, experience of using public services, geographical coverage, many eyes and hands.

• IT skills: coders and hackers are, generally speaking, better and faster than government at creating applications. For instance, Openly Local is a far more usable and sophisticated service that government have implemented.
• specific thematic knowledge: Wikipedia teaches us that everyone has something (s)he’s expert on. Peertopatent exploits the technological knowledge on things such as parallel simulation, Netsmum the maternal experience such as high-heeled shoes for babies
• experience as users of public services: it is costly and difficult for government to understand the perspective of users. Open feedback channels such as PatientOpinion highlight problems that government would not think about , such as toilets being too low
• pervasive geographic coverage: citizens obviously have a more pervasive coverage of the territory than government. It is far more effective to let citizens casually signal a problem in a street than to have civil servants travelling up and down the city. This is particularly relevant in disaster situation where only citizens have the information at the right time, such as in the case of monitoring radiation levels in Japan after Fukushima.
• trust: citizens trust friends and experts more than government. Mums trust other mums better than government. If you want to pass messages and induce behavioural change, such as inducing people to live a healthier life as in ActiveMobs, it is well known that you have to take into account the power of imitation and influence of networks.
• many eyes and many hands: citizens are more and it is therefore more effective to let them monitor the quality of the data (see the small pencil icon in the Italian gov website); or to help doing large collaborative works such as in the case of DigitalKoot where 80.000 Finnish citizens took part in an online game to digitize and catalogue old newspapers and journals.

My first answer was to include emphasis on citizen-generated data. The study and the workshop provided me with a better answer, mutuated from Tim O’ Reilly: public services that get better the more people use them.

Traditionally, in public services, the quality of services is measured in such a way that increased usage corresponds to lower quality. In health or education, countries are compared in terms of hospital beds per inhabitant, or teacher per pupil. In this way, when expenditure remains constant, increase in usage lowers the quality of the services.

When we refer to e-government, this increase in uptake has not a negative impact on service levels: the service level of attending an online training, or filling a form, is not affected by additional users using the service. With constant cost, the quality of service remains constant even with increase in uptake.

With government 2.0 or collaborative e-government, additional usage actually increases the quality of service:

- the more citizens signal problems in their city in seeclickfix.com, the more value the application has, the faster the problems get solved

- the more citizens provide feedback on hospitals in patientopinion, the better service it can provide and the better services hospital will provide

- the more citizens contribute to peertopatent, the better patents are assessed

- the more citizens “adopt” information on public website, the more accurate the information gets (LineaAmica)

- the more citizens play with DigiKoot, the better catalogue the Library of Finland can provide

- the more mums discuss on Mumsnet, the better they can take care of their kids

- the more citizens search on the Delaware.gov website, the better the portal gets in showing the most relevant information

and so on…

This definition provides a new way to think about public services which conveys the message that collaborative e-government is NOT about a few geeks developing apps with open data, but taking advantage of the skills and goodwill of large numbers of citizens, with different degree of e-skills.

Citizens are uniquely placed to co-produce services because they:

- have unique skills (e.g. in assessing patents, raising kids)

- have the users’ perspective on public services (e.g. in using hospitals)

- are many (e.g. in DigiKoot and SeeClickFix)!

In conclusion, the recommendations will focus on encouraging government to think about what unique contribution citizens can make to public services.

This is even more important in times of crisis: it offers a path to increase the quality of services without substantial additional investments. And to learning faster about successful and unsuccessful ways to spend public money, avoiding waste.