Wiki Government: How Technology Can Make Government Better, Democracy Stronger, and Citizens More Powerful
Beth Simone Noveck
Brookings Institution Press
224pp
£20.99
The US patent office faces the same problems found in many public sector institutions across the world – it is under-staffed for the role it is meant to fulfil and has built up a huge backlog of work. As a result, applicants may have to wait up to five years for a decision. Even then, the examiner will take their decision after only a few hours research, frequently leading to bad patents being granted, which in turn stifles rather than promotes innovation. In short, the system does not work very well.
‘Wiki Government’ is largely inspired by Noveck’s first-hand experience of designing and piloting Peer-to-Patent, a experimental process for researching applications and providing additional information to patent examiners. The aim of the exercise was to demonstrate and understand how new technology could be used to harness the expertise of people, whether they were university professors, private sector engineers or keen amateurs, currently excluded from the process, so as to make the whole patent system both better and faster.
While it offers a thoughtful account of an interesting case study illustrating the potential of collaborative technologies, ‘Wiki Government’ does suffer from a couple of flaws. The copy-editing of the volume is poor and some inexplicable errors have crept through (perhaps most obviously for a British audience the statement that Andrew Gowers, author of a 2006 report of patent reform in the UK, is the chancellor of the exchequer). More significantly, the volume only offers the most cursory examination of democratic theory, and a very superficial critique of the representative and deliberative paradigms. While Noveck clearly recognises that these paradigms are challenged by the civic potential of collaborative technologies, there is little attempt to develop these ideas at the conceptual level.
However, these failings aside, there are important arguments in this book. Noveck claims that the massive programmes of the New Deal settlement created the modern administrative state (the same might be said of the creation of the welfare state in the UK). These events gave technocrats and experts based in central government a huge role in policy formulation and service provision. While recent British governments of all political persuasions have entered office promising decentralisation, the temptation to concentrate power remains one of the defining characteristics of the modern state. For the potential of collaborative technologies to be realised, both the institutions and culture of central control must now be rejected. This requires nothing less than a revolution in the workings of the state.
Most importantly, Noveck’s experiences offer an important lesson: adapting to these changes is going to be hard. Politicians of all parties too often talk of new technology as if it will be a magic bullet or see it as a solution that can be implemented “out of a box”. The example of Peer-to-Patent proves this is not the case. Its success was the result of careful design to fulfil a specialist purpose, hard work, and a willingness to experiment (and a corresponding willingness to fail and return to the drawing board). Even more impressively, this success was achieved while working alongside a number of important stakeholders, including the US patent office, the examiners union, and technology companies who were going to be applying for the patents. This clearly demonstrates the depth of the coalitions required to make such projects happen, and the extent of the political will needed to make them a success.