The Securities and Exchange Commission, for instance, just announced it is updating its rules for social media. The rules may “fall short” but, overall, the SEC’s initiative is a welcome effort to adapt policies to emerging technologies. In other words, the government gets it. And not just for financial reporting — regulators are also updating rules to account for the impact of new technologies on everything from crowd-funding to video rentals to the Patent Office.

In light of such progress, why then is the government so often reviled by the tech community? To see what I mean, look at recent stories (and related comments) involving issues like online privacy, file-sharing or the sad death of internet activist Aaron Swartz. These situations, which may reflect poor choices by individual prosecutors or bureaucrats, have served to reinforce an article of faith for many tech enthusiasts: that the government is populated by people who are malicious and intellectually inferior to those who read sites like Reddit or Hacker News.

The same phenomenon can be detected in headlines like “It’s a Crime for 12-year-olds to Read the New York Times Online” or “Senate bill rewrite leds feds read your e-mail without warrants.” These are examples of tech writers using hyperbole to reinforce an us-versus-them narrative that their readers take as a given. This narrative in many ways resembles the world of comic book protagonists.

While the press and tech readers are right to be vigilant, the larger caricature of bungling government fools is neither fair nor responsible. For starters, the people who work at places like the SEC or the Justice Department are not schleps off the street who can barely use a computer; instead, they are often top-of-the-class graduates who accepted less money in favor of more fulfilling work. The agencies they work in can be dysfunctional — like many big corporations — but the people themselves are not.

There is an even larger problem of looking at the government through the fast-moving prism of the tech community. Namely, the government is not supposed to resemble the tech sector in the first place — pivoting, rapid adaptation and “move fast and break things” are fine qualities for a start-up, but they’re ill-suited as a method of governing a democracy.

Don’t forget that the country as a whole looks nothing like the tech sector. America is not disproportionately composed of affluent white and Asian males, but instead contains a far more diverse population with a multitude of interests and incomes. This is the lens through which policy choices should be viewed — not through cliches that pit tech geniuses against bungling bureaucrats.

(Image by saddako via Shutterstock)

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But, last year, Bryan Sivak, the CTO and entrepreneur-in-residence at the Department of Health and Human Services, was tapped to bring more Silicon Valley spirit to the massive department. (Prior to working in government, he founded a company that was acquired by Oracle). And it looks like his touch is starting to move the agency further along a startup-inspired track.

At the SXSW Interactive conference in Austin on Saturday, Sivak said he’s tried to promote a definition of innovation that gives people the “freedom to experiment.”

“I can teach you how to experiment. I can teach you how to develop a hypothesis. I can teach you how to define some tests that generate some metrics. I can teach you how to analyze those metrics to determine whether or not your test was successful and I can give you the freedom to execute some of these things,” he said. “This is something that’s critical for an entity like the federal government, which is very bureaucratic and structured and all the things we wish it wasn’t in a lot of cases.”

Sivak isn’t the first to bring lean startup theory to HHS. Sivak’s predecessor Todd Park, co-founder of health tech giants Athenahealth and Castlight and current CTO of the United States, drew on his tech chops to start opening up health data and transforming health care. But here a few of the more recent Silicon Valley-style programs at HHS.

Yammer-powered social networking

Getting 90,000 government employees to collaborate is obviously no easy task. But using Yammer, HHS employees across the department now have the opportunity to share ideas and reach out to people up and down the bureaucratic hierarchy through HHSConnect.  Since launching a few months ago, 10,000 of the department’s employees have used the platform with many using it actively, said Sivak.

Open coworking spaces

Like many startup CEOs, Sivak said he believes in the “serendipitous collisions” that happen between coworkers who work in open spaces. But in government cubicles, he said, “the only thing you’re going to collide with is air.”  To up the chances of serendipitous in-person collaboration, the department is creating “HHSLabs” – an open, modular, technologically-tricked out work space open to anyone in the agency.  It’s also opening its doors to health startup CEOs and other private sector visitors to DC who want a temporary place to work.

Internal crowdfunding for resources

To support entrepreneurial-minded people at HHS who come up with interesting ideas but need people with other skills or resources to get their projects off the ground, Sivak said they’ve created an internal crowdfunding-like site where people can solicit support. Called “HHSFairtrade,” people can post descriptions of their ideas and others across the department can commit needed resources or support. Like Kickstarter, the project only activates once it receives all of the commitments it needs to launch.

Seed funding for internal innovators

If it’s a little bit of cash that internal innovators need to test their ideas, Sivak said they can turn to “HHSIgnite.” The program gives department employees small amounts of money to try out new approaches. If the project can show returns in three to six months, he said, it can become a stronger candidate for allocated funds.

Opening the door to outside entrepreneurs

More technologists like Park and Sivak are bringing a startup mindset to the public sector, but Sivak knows that many of the country’s most innovative thinkers don’t live inside the Beltway. To tap into their ideas, he said, the department created “HHS Entrepreneurs,”a new program based on the HHS Innovation Fellows program launched last year. One track invites HHS employees to apply to be “internal entrepreneurs” who will work on special team and get extra networking, mentoring and professional development opportunities. But the other track is open to entrepreneurs around the country who would come to HHS to work with internal entrepreneurs for 6 to 12 months on “high risk, high reward” problems, Sivak said.

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President Obama, who was celebrated by some as the “first internet president” after taking office — thanks to his use of a BlackBerry, as well as various web-based open government initiatives — has showed even more flair for the web and social media in the past year or so, in part by hosting events such as the Twitter town hall in 2011 and a Reddit “Ask Me Anything” feature during the election campaign last fall, in which he took questions from users of the online community.

More open, or more controlling of the media?

While all of these tools and strategies make the president seem more approachable and human to some, however, to members of the traditional press it is part of an attempt by the Obama government to do an end-run around the media and get its message out directly without any fear of being challenged (although the traditional media seem to have had no problem covering up the existence of a drone base in Saudi Arabia when asked to do so). According to Politico:

“President Barack Obama is a master at limiting, shaping and manipulating media coverage of himself and his White House [and] the mastery mostly flows from a White House that has taken old tricks for shaping coverage (staged leaks, friendly interviews) and put them on steroids using new ones (social media, content creation, precision targeting).”

As the Politico piece notes, governments have always tried to engineer their own messages, whether through hokey PR stunts like Calvin Coolidge’s radio addresses or government-produced propaganda shown in movie theaters, or through friendly reporters who are willing to write uncritically — as many have accused writer Judith Miller of doing at the New York Times when she covered the build-up to the Iraq War. But social media provides so many more tools (and real-time ones) for governments to use.

Just as Elon Musk of Tesla used his blog — and some of the user data that his electric car produced during a New York Times review — to argue his case against the newspaper, the Obama government has almost as many tools (if not more) at its disposal as any of the media entities it used to rely on for coverage. It can produce and distribute news stories, audio interviews and video clips just as well as anyone, and media companies who have cut costs are always looking for free content. One photographer said the White House has “built its own content distribution network.”

The balance of power has shifted

As Politico describes it, the “balance of power between the White House and the press has tipped unmistakeably towards the government.” The Obama administration is said to be eschewing unscripted scrums in favor of orchestrated media campaigns like the Reddit AMA, which was widely criticized for not being as hard-hitting as a traditional interview (although I took issue with that description). Former Clinton-era press secretary Mike McCurry told Politico:

“The balance of power used to be much more in favor of the mainstream press [but now] the White House gets away with stuff I would never have dreamed of doing. When I talk to White House reporters now, they say it’s really tough to do business with people who don’t see the need to be cooperative.”

That word “cooperative” sums it up in a nutshell: in the past, governments had to cooperate with the media because they needed it to get their message out, just as companies like Tesla used to. But that’s not the case any more — or at least not as much as it used to be. The playing field has been leveled. Is that a good thing or a bad thing for democracy, or for society in general? Is more information better, even if it comes directly from the government?

Images courtesy of Shutterstock / Picsfive and Flickr user jphilipg

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Charged with identifying more airwaves for commercial use, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) recommended last year that the private and public sector split time on government airwaves. The idea is that the DOD and other users were only using their spectrum at certain times and in certain places, so why not let carriers access those frequencies whenever and wherever they weren’t occupied by the feds?

Carriers traditionally like licenses they can call their own, and the industry initially responded to the deal with skepticism. In a blog post, AT&T still said it would rather see airwaves cleared entirely of government users and auctioned for commercial use but was amenable to the idea of sharing if clearing the airwaves was not possible.

“I want to emphasize that we continue to believe that clearing and reallocating is the best approach to freeing up much needed spectrum for commercial mobile broadband use,” AT&T Assistant VP Stacey Black wrote in the policy blog. “The existing exclusive licensing regime has resulted in billions of dollars in wireless infrastructure investment, enabling the U.S. to lead the way in the global mobile broadband marketplace. While clearing spectrum for exclusive commercial licensing must remain the top priority, when that is neither time nor cost effective, AT&T supports exploring sharing arrangements.”

Black hints at another possible obstacle to a shared spectrum plan: Congress. Lawmakers have counted on the billions raised in spectrum auctions to fill government coffers. Depending on how spectrum sharing was implemented it would either raise no money or far less than previous auctions.

Over the next few months, the three carriers and the DOD conduct trials and simulations of sharing scenarios at government installations. The results of those tests will be released in March.

Sprint was the only carrier in the Big 4 not on the list, but a Sprint spokesman told FierceWireless that the company works closely with the NTIA and will be following the tests closely.

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To put things in perspective, the British Broadcasting Corp. isn’t just a government-financed news outlet. It also happens to be one of the largest broadcasters and news agencies in the world, with almost 25,000 employees, and an annual budget — financed primarily by the “TV tax” that the British government levies on every television set owning household in the country — of more than $5 billion. Do we really need that kind of state-financed news entity in an age when journalism is everywhere? Couldn’t that amount of money be used in better ways, either to fund independent news entities or for some other purpose?

Dear everybody hating on the BBC. I have three words for you. American cable TV. Choose carefully :)

—
umair haque (@umairh) November 10, 2012

Does the BBC need to be restructured or dismantled?

The first bombshell to hit what Brits call “The Beeb” came when Jimmy Savile, host of a long-running entertainment show, was accused of having engaged in sexual abuse of children over a span of several decades. The state broadcaster’s show Newsnight had a piece prepared that detailed these allegations, but someone at the organization spiked the story. The director-general of the agency, Mark Thompson — who just became the new CEO of the New York Times Co. — has said he had no knowledge of the incident, but the decision has sparked a loss of confidence in the BBC’s ability to monitor itself.

Just weeks after this crisis, the broadcaster aired a Newsnight documentary about a separate case of sexual-abuse allegations, and identified a prominent MP Conservative, Lord McAlpine, as the perpetrator. Unfortunately for the BBC and everyone involved in the program, the victim later said that his attacker was not Lord McAlpine — and it turned out that the broadcaster had not actually confirmed that McAlpine was involved, nor had it approached the MP about the allegations. The BBC’s new director-general has stepped down after just 2 months in the job, and the agency’s director of news and the deputy director for news have also stepped aside. (Update: As a number of readers have pointed out, the program didn’t name Lord McAlpine but referred to a senior Conservative from the Thatcher era. At least one of the journalists who worked on the documentary identified the subject as McAlpine, however, and that information then spread through Twitter).

Much of the response to these events has focused on how the BBC needs to be restructured in some way: how the head of the news or editorial division should be separate from the head of the business side or the director-general’s office, etc. Former Guardian digital editor Emily Bell, now at Columbia University running the Tow Center for Digital Journalism, does a good job of retracing the steps that may have led to the BBC’s recent journalistic failures. And almost everyone notes that the Beeb is still trusted and in some cases even revered by the British people — but there are those who suggest otherwise:

When I first joined, the BBC was a community of passionate programme makers. Now a labyrinthine, largely unaccountable, bureaucracy. Tragic

—
Martin Hughes-Games (@MartinHGames) November 12, 2012

Do we need a single state-funded source of journalism?

But while the BBC’s decisions in both of these cases deserve all the investigation they are getting both from within the agency and from outside it, it’s worth asking whether the British government — and by extension the British populace — need to be financing a $5-billion organization to produce journalism. And if they do, what should that entity’s purpose be? A similar question could be asked in Australia and Canada, both of which have their own national versions of the BBC (the U.S. also helps subsidize National Public Radio and other public entities, although the majority of their revenue comes from donations).

As even a former chairman of the British broadcaster has pointed out, one of the biggest criticisms that can be made of a state-funded news outlet like the BBC is that it is being paid to compete with private broadcasters and news companies, many of which can barely afford to continue doing business at all, let alone match the vast revenue and resources of the Beeb. Along with its counterparts in Australia and Canada, the BBC has become a powerful force in online news, ranking just below outlets like the New York Times and CNN when it comes to overall audience.

Supporters argue that there is a place for an (allegedly) impartial source of journalism, one that will undertake the kinds of investigative projects that other outlets do not — and that would be a great rationale for the existence of a state-funded news entity, if that’s all the BBC and its counterparts did. But the reality is that they also produce a vast quantity of regular news and entertainment as well. Is that really something that residents of Britain need to subsidize with their taxes?

If governments want to fund the creation of news and journalism, maybe they would be better off finding some way to do that by financing independent entities, the way the Knight Foundation and other non-profit trusts do, instead of propping up anachronistic players like the BBC.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr users zawtowers and R/DV/RS

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Coursera, which offers online-education courses, was recently hit with a regulatory freeze in Minnesota, because the rules for education-related businesses in that state require that they jump through a series of hoops, including filing for registration (and paying fees). The state later modified its views on the service after an uproar about these restrictions, but it is unlikely to be the only roadblock the company runs into as it tries to expand. The reality is that in any number of markets, from education to the hotel industry to broadcasting, regulations haven’t kept up with the evolution of the businesses they are supposed to be regulating.

Entrenched industries and regulators are fighting hard

Airbnb is in a similar position to the hotel industry: the application of social features — which allow owners of apartments, houses, trailers and even treehouses to easily find and connect with potential short-term renters — has changed the balance of power to the point where someone with a spare room has the ability to create a peer-powered business with virtually no overhead. That’s clearly a threat to the hotel business, which is using whatever political and regulatory connections it can to put limits on the company, even as its grows larger: Airbnb is rumored to be talking with Facebook investor Peter Thiel about a funding round that would value it at $2 billion.

It’s important to note that the social aspect of these services is crucial to their success. As I tried to describe in a recent post about using Airbnb, the social element isn’t just a nice addition — it is a key part of how it functions, and why the barriers to entry and transaction costs are lowered as a result. If I hadn’t been able to see that an owner was connected to a Facebook friend, I might never have used it (and they might never have accepted me as a renter). Designing this kind of socially-powered service is something I’m going to be talking about with Airbnb co-founder Joe Gebbia at GigaOM’s RoadMap conference on November 5th.

Uber, the car-scheduling service, has been another prominent participant in this back-and-forth struggle with regulations and an entrenched industry — virtually everywhere the company has set up shop, from San Francisco to New York, it has run into a regulatory morass that is designed to protect the existing taxi and livery industry as much as it is intended to protect consumers. Although New York has been trying to fast-track changes that would make it easier to operate there, the SF-based company was recently forced to withdraw one version of its service.

The service has had problems in San Francisco as well, and is likely to run into similar issues anywhere there is an entrenched taxi industry that is trying to protect its historic market power and profit margins. In New York, for example, taxi “medallions” — which allow an owner to operate a cab business there — sell for $1 million each. That kind of industry isn’t going to appreciate a disruptor like Uber, and in New York in particular the taxi business is a big political player. In many ways, however, Uber is just the thin edge of a larger wedge: also coming are services like Hailo that use an Uber-style service model for the regular cab business.

Disruptive businesses as “regulatory hacks”

As New York-based venture investor Chris Dixon described it in a recent blog post, startups like Airbnb and Uber are “regulatory hacks,” in the sense that they are designed to do an end-run around existing industry regulations — in much the same way the early disruption in telecom was driven by startups which played fast-and-loose with the rules, and eventually forced regulatory change and became the norm. As Dixon puts it:

“Uber is being threatened by the taxi industry, Aereo by the TV broadcasting industry, and Airbnb by the hotel industry… Of course, regulations that truly protect the public interest are necessary. But many regulations are created by incumbents to protect their market position. To try new things, entrepreneurs need to find a back door. And when they succeed, it will all look obvious in retrospect. Today’s regulatory hack is tomorrow’s mainstream industry.”

The list of these kinds of companies is only continuing to grow: Kickstarter and Indiegogo have not only helped entrepreneurs raise millions of dollars outside the traditional financing industry, but they have also helped trigger changes to federal legislation around small-business funding — and have spawned their own offshoots as well, such as Kickstarter-style platforms that focus on specific niches like raising money for amateur athletes. Aereo may not be a typical startup, since it is backed by billionaire Barry Diller, but it is also aimed at disrupting a traditional business (broadcasting) that is tangled in red tape and controlled by an oligopoly.

There are dozens of other startups such as Lyft and SideCar and TaskRabbit that are trying to bring the peer-to-peer model of social business to different aspects of various industries — even custom manufacturing, where platforms like Etsy and others help creators monetize their services without having to go through the usual channels or middlemen. Regulatory restrictions can impede these kinds of solutions for awhile, or even cause one or two to fail, but the tide of which they are a part continues to advance.

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After giving a kind of whirlwind tour of the open-source movement in his talk, including the rise of Linux, Shirky devoted much of his discussion to Github — a kind of crowdsourced platform for maintaining code that Linux creator Linus Torvalds also created, which allows anyone to edit, to “fork” or create their own version, and to track the changes that others make. It’s not a big stretch to get from that idea to the idea of crowdsourcing legislation, which is what Shirky seems to have in mind, and there have already been some attempts at doing this via Github: for example, a German software developer has uploaded all of Germany’s laws to the platform so that citizens can recommend and track changes.

It’s an intriguing idea: that a simple software platform aimed at collaboration could change the way legislation is developed and implemented, much like the process that powers Wikipedia has created a crowdsourced encyclopedia that evolves and changes over time. But is it realistic? There were plenty of skeptics who said Wikipedia would never succeed, and yet it has an excellent track record when it comes to reliability, despite some hiccups in the process, such as the recent incident involving author Philip Roth. That said, however, there are also plenty of critics who believe that the “cabal” of editors who control the crowd-powered encyclopedia have too much authority.

Of course, some would argue that we’re already in that kind of situation with most governments anyway, and therefore Github couldn’t make things any worse. And Shirky is not the only one to make this argument: developer Abe Voelker has proposed a “Github for laws” that would take exactly the same approach to crafting and crowdsourcing legislation. There have also been some initial experiments with similar ideas — including Iceland’s new constitution and similar types of project in Finland and Ireland — which shows that others are also open to the concept.

One of the problems with applying a technical solution like Github to a massive cultural and political process like government, however, is that creating laws — even small ones — is very different from changing a piece of code so that Linux can duplicate Windows-style typefaces, or changing the Wikipedia entry on George Bush. And if even those kinds of prosaic examples can lead to the equivalent of a Linux or Wikipedia holy war, which in many cases they have, what hope do we have that politicians can actually use a similar process to change the way that government works? As Shirky suggests in his talk, there’s also a pretty entrenched bureaucracy that has become part of most governments and likely has no interest in relinquishing that control to the crowd.

In his book “Here Comes Everybody,” Shirky described the potentially massive impact of crowdsourcing and crowd-powered social change, and his admiration of Github seems to be part of an attempt to find tools that will help us deal with the tidal wave of human-driven collaboration. This is something we clearly need, so it’s worthwhile to start looking at solutions — and while Github may not be the answer, at this point just about anything is probably worth a shot.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr user Fabio Venni

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The impetus for this idea (which would levy a fee of two British pounds (about $3.20 US) on every internet account to create a government investment fund), is abundantly obvious: print-advertising revenue, which most general-interest papers rely on for the bulk of their income, has fallen off a rather large cliff over the past several years, and the rate of decline seems to be accelerating rather than slowing. Paywalls may be picking up some of the slack for a few providers, but they are not enough to fill the gap completely — and so companies are cutting back, and in the case of U.S. papers even shutting down print.

Journalism and newspapers are no longer synonymous

Editors like Leigh — and columnists like Roy Greenslade of the Guardian, who wholeheartedly supports the idea of an internet tax to subsidize print papers — are understandably concerned about the effect that this unprecedented industry decline is likely to have on journalism, which they argue serves a crucial public purpose and therefore can’t be left to the whims of the marketplace. Others in the U.S., including New York Times media writer David Carr, have raised similar concerns about the effect on cities such as New Orleans when their newspaper shrinks in size or stops printing, and can (theoretically at least) no longer hold politicians and other evil-doers to account in the way they always have. As Leigh puts it:

“When the day comes that the newspapers are forced to stop printing altogether, it will be a disaster for democracy. The lean pickings from web advertising on a free newspaper site will only pay for a fraction of the high-quality investigative journalism that commercial newspapers generate.”

There are a whole series of problems with the internet-tax idea, many of which journalist Allan Donald has summarized in a smart and funny post (which, as Chris Dixon points out, imitates a popular geek response to early spam-fighting ideas). Among his points are that such a plan “tries to support a fundamentally broken business model” and “users of the web will not put up with it.” As Paul Carr notes at Pando Daily, the idea of compensating or financing newspapers based on their readership and market share could also worsen some of the existing problems with digital media, since all it would do is encourage papers to boost their traffic by whatever means possible.

But one of the biggest flaws with the tax idea, as Charlie Beckett at the LSE points out, is that it is based on the principle that journalism — of the kind that is deserving of government funding — is synonymous with newspapers. Even if that was the case in the distant past, it clearly isn’t any more: such a plan would leave out a growing number of alternative providers, from non-profit entities like the Bureau of Investigative Journalism to smaller web-only media outlets (some would argue that the Guardian is also a non-profit, but not by design). And these kinds of alternative services and startups, many of whom are trying to reinvent journalism for a digital age, are arguably more deserving of funding than the large newspapers who already have giant market share.

Taxing internet users would do little to “save” journalism

The reality is that the internet-tax plan would do very little to help subsidize journalism that is in the public interest. Instead, it would be used to subsidize a failing business model, one that continues to be based primarily around a dying medium called print. How would that benefit society as a whole? I think Carr is right when he says the industry needs to be more creative in finding a range of small ideas and solutions to their problems, not depending on a massive publicly-funded bailout.

Some of the proponents of the internet-tax idea argue that it makes sense for Britain to take such measures, since a similar structure — namely, a government-imposed TV tax — is used to subsidize the BBC. But whether you believe that a tax on the purchase of a specific consumer product is the appropriate way to do such a thing (which I would argue it is not), creating a single government media outlet for public-service purposes is a very different thing from setting up a fund that would be used to prop up an entire industry.

American newspaper owners like Advance Publications — which has shut down a print paper in Michigan and cut back on printing in a number of other cities — have been criticized for their failure to negotiate the transition from print to digital well, and there is no question that their handling of the move and their digital replacements leaves a lot to be desired. But at least they, and other struggling newspaper chains such as the Journal Register Co. (which recently filed for bankruptcy for the second time) are trying to find a way towards a new model, not asking for governments to subsidize the existing one.

Saving — or rather, enhancing and expanding — journalism is a noble and worthwhile goal, and finding innovative solutions for doing so is a commendable idea. But taxing internet users to prop up a largely print-based newspaper industry is not the same thing. Not even close.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Shutterstock/iQoncept and Flickr user Zarko Drincic

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Earlier this year, the Finnish government enabled something called a “citizens’ initiative”, through which registered voters can come up with new laws – if they can get 50,000 of their fellow citizens to back them up within six months, then the Eduskunta (the Finnish parliament) is forced to vote on the proposal.

Now this crowdsourced law-making system is about to go online through a platform called the Open Ministry. The non-profit organization has been collecting signatures for various proposals on paper since 1 March, when citizens’ initiatives came in, but a couple of days ago the government approved the electronic ID mechanism that underpins the digital version of the platform. That means it can now go live on 1 October.

“The National Communications Security Authority audited our code, our security policies and our service/hosting providers to ensure that the details of citizens are safe and can’t be hacked into,” Open Ministry founder Joonas Pekkanen told me via email. “[The system verifies] the people’s identity through the APIs offered by banks and mobile operators. So people can sign the initiatives online with the online banking codes or their mobile phones.”

What’s more, the banks and operators are providing the use of their strong verification APIs for free, as part of their social responsibility policies. Welcome to Finland!

Could it work elsewhere?

There are clear similarities to be found between the Finnish model and that being experimented with by the German Pirate Party, but the Open Ministry platform is somewhat less radical and less likely to be derailed by endless collaborative editing. The first batch of proposals on the Finnish platform is pretty varied: a ban on fur farming, a requirement for all public software procurement to take into account open data and APIs, a ban on energy drinks for under-16s, and a referendum on Finland’s restrictive alcohol laws (the government has a monopoly and prices are sky-high).

Assuming they get their 50,000 signatures (the fur-farming one has already amassed 43,500 paper signatures), each will have to be voted on by the Eduskunta. Compare that with, for example, the UK system – there, an e-petition that garners 100,000 backers wins the grand prize of being considered by a government back-office and maybe being discussed in Parliament.

But could it work elsewhere? On a technical level, there is little reason why not. Indeed, the Open Ministry platform is (naturally) open-source and available on GitHub. “We encourage anyone to fork and contribute to it and use it in other countries also,” Pekkanen said.

But a lot of this drive for openness has a cultural and political basis. Perhaps it has something to do with the cold winters (as suggested to me by representatives of the Finnish Innovation Fund in Helsinki this week) or their small-ish populations, but the Nordic countries tend to have relatively close societies where people are enthusiastic about pitching into civic life. Politically, Iceland provides a great example with its partly-crowdsourced constitution.

And in terms of civic-minded tech projects that capitalize on open data, Finland has a particularly impressive roster. Just a few examples:

• The Helsinki Region Infoshare project, which collates and offers up municipal datasets.
• APIs for official campaign-funding audit data.
• The crowdsourced digitization of Finland’s national archives.

That’s give-and-take activity, with some projects engendering trust between citizenry and government, and others benefitting from trust being there in the first place – people are less likely to contribute to an officially-sanctioned project if they think it’s pointless or exploitative. By way of a slightly frivolous example, where but somewhere like Finland would you find a national patient health records co-operative with this tagline?

Tech-driven democracy fans in other countries may not find the environment as conducive to crowdsourced legislation right now, but on the other hand they just got themselves a model to study. If crowdsourced legislation is going to work anywhere, Finland would be the right place for it to happen.

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To some extent, WikiLeaks has always been as much myth as substance, and possibly even more so. The idea of a secretive group of information outlaws with servers located in Iceland or deep inside a Swedish mountain, especially a group headed by a white-haired fellow right out of a spy novel, always seemed almost too good to be true. And anyone who has gotten close to the organization, from Icelandic MP Birgitta Jonsdottir — who helped edit the infamous Collateral Murder video showing a U.S. military attack on civilians in Iraq — to former New York Times executive editor Bill Keller, has found that the reality lacks a certain something when compared to the myth.

The spotlight on Assange blinds us to the real issues

As Glenn Greenwald noted in a post at The Guardian this week, much of what has been written about WikiLeaks over the past year has focused exclusively on Assange and the rape charges that Sweden is expected to level against him if and when he is ever handed over to that country. There has been little or no coverage — at least from the mainstream media — about the effects of the ongoing financial blockade of WikiLeaks that was instituted last year by PayPal and Visa and MasterCard (which the organization is trying to get around by using the peer-to-peer money system known as Bitcoin) or who might be behind the recent denial-of-service attacks on WikiLeaks that seem to have been orchestrated by U.S.-based sources. Why? Greenwald has a theory:

“There are several obvious reasons why Assange provokes such unhinged media contempt. The most obvious among them is competition: the resentment generated by watching someone outside their profession generate more critical scoops in a year than all other media outlets combined.”

Whatever the reason, with Assange and his legal and personal problems hogging the spotlight, it’s easy to lose sight of what WikiLeaks has accomplished, whether because of or in spite of Assange’s leadership (or possibly both). Whatever you think of the U.S. government or the U.S. military, the Collateral Murder video was a groundbreaking moment in coverage of the country’s activities in Iraq and by extension the rest of the Middle East, and the release of hundreds of thousands of U.S. diplomatic cables was also a watershed event, even if the tangible effects of that document dump are difficult to quantify in political terms.

Would any of that information have come to light without WikiLeaks? Perhaps. And it’s important to remember that WikiLeaks didn’t come up with all of those documents on its own — they were delivered to it by the original leaker, who may or may not be former U.S. Army intelligence analyst Bradley Manning, the man the government has been holding in a military prison for more than two years without a trial on accusations of espionage.

A former colleague of mine, the Globe and Mail’s European correspondent Doug Saunders, has argued that WikiLeaks was no more than a virtual “brown envelope” for the data that Manning (or whoever it was) came up with, a simple mechanism for distributing the leaks, in the same way that Deep Throat handed over documents to the Washington Post‘s Watergate team in a parking garage. In other words, there shouldn’t be any more attention paid to WikiLeaks than there was to the U.S. postal system or to parking garages. But is that true, or does WikiLeaks represent a significant shift in the global flow of information?

We need a stateless news organization, however flawed

I think it’s the latter. It’s true that WikiLeaks has used publications like the New York Times and The Guardian and Die Zeit to help it sift through and publicize the information that has come out of the leaks it acquired — but that was as much about marketing as anything else. The reality is that WikiLeaks is a publisher, and a radically new variation on the species: one that has no state affiliation, either express or implied, as journalism professor Jay Rosen suggested when he called it the world’s first “stateless news organization.” In a world where even the New York Times fails to discharge its duty properly during events like the coverage of the Iraq war, such an entity is more important than ever.

WikiLeaks has also spawned a kind of mini-explosion of imitators, including leak dumps that are devoted to environmental data, or information about the corrupt political system in the Balkans, or about dozens of other topics. As a recent piece at Radio Free Europe pointed out, many of these have either failed or are in a state of disrepair for a variety of reasons (not least of which is the fact that running an anonymous document archive that can’t be traced or hacked into is exceedingly difficult), and the most famous of all — OpenLeaks, which was set up by former WikiLeaks insider Daniel Domscheit-Berg — is still mostly nonfunctional.

As flawed as they might be, however, they continue to exist. And the example set by WikiLeaks can be seen even in smaller incidents, like the recent “document dump” that Gawker provided of presidential hopeful Mitt Romney’s financial records. While there may be no smoking gun in those files, just the fact that they have been made public has changed the game to some extent, and will likely encourage more of the same.

It’s worth noting that even those who have had a falling out with Julian Assange or WikiLeaks, including both Jonsdottir and the NYT’s Keller, have repeatedly said that the organization and its mercurial founder need to be supported, in the interests of freedom of speech. Keller said in an email to me recently that whatever we may think of Assange or his organization, it is a journalistic outlet or entity just as the New York Times or any other newspaper is — and we should be just as protective of its right to free speech and a free press.

That is the true legacy of WikiLeaks: flawed or not, mythical or substantive, it is an engine of free speech and free information, and as such it is worth defending, whatever we might think of its leader.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr user New Media Days

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