Wiki Government: Nobody is as clever as everybody
The core of the argument by Beth Noveck in Wiki-Government. How open-source technology can make government decision-making more expert and more democratic.
new technology may be changing the relationship between democracy and expertise, affording an opportunity to improve competence by making good information available for better governance. Large-scale knowledge-sharing projects, such as the Wikipedia online encyclopedia, and volunteer software-programming initiatives, such as the Apache Webserver (which runs two-thirds of the websites in the world), demonstrate the inadequacy of our assumptions about expertise in the twenty-first century. Ordinary people, regardless of institutional affiliation or professional status, possess information–serious, expert, fact-based, scientific information–to enhance decision-making, information not otherwise available to isolated bureaucrats. Partly as a result of the simple tools now available for collaboration and partly as a result of a highly mobile labor market of "knowledge workers," people are ready and willing to share that information across geographic, disciplinary, and institutional boundaries.
And The Problem with Experts
In his award-winning book On Political Judgment , social psychologist Philip Tetlock analyzed the predictions of those professionals who advise government about political and economic trends. Pitting these professional pundits against minimalist performance benchmarks, he found "few signs that expertise translates into greater ability to make either ‘well-calibrated’ or ‘discriminating’ forecasts." It turns out that professional status has much less bearing on the quality of information than we might assume, and that professionals–whether in politics or other domains–are notoriously unsuccessful at making informed predictions.Moreover, the traditional reliance on institutionalized expertise is fraught with political controversy. Sometimes these pre-selected scientists and outside experts are simply lobbyists passing by another name. The current administration, for example, regularly replaces experts on agency advisory panels with ideologues and political allies. In a published statement titled Restoring Scientific Integrity in Policy Making, over 60 preeminent scientists, including Nobel laureates and National Medal of Science recipients, lambasted the Bush Administration for "manipulation of the process through which science enters into its decisions." But if Bush is among the more egregious violators of the presumed wall between politics and institutionalized expertise, his actions only go to show how easy it is for any executive to abuse his or her power of appointment to disrupt experts’ advisory function.
Thought provoking
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