Transcript:
Intro
Imagine a Governmental Information System where every citizen is interconnected; everyone has the ability to participate in decision making; where bureaucracy is automated, and you don’t have to worry about unstable economies. A Platform which would make democracy transparent and the decision-making process as easy as deciding what to eat for breakfast. An e-Government Platform where you no longer need to fill out a huge number of contracts, agreements and requests. An e-Government System which would provide instant updates on the public treasury and integrates real time market information to calculate subsidies and taxes on the fly.
Why isn’t there such a System by now?
Think about all the little differences in our daily lives. Think about how many different functions such a system would have to provide. The complexity of this system would be tremendous! Not only handling all these different functional requests, also providing the needed security and accessibility leads to the fact that we would need many skilled people working on such a big project. Access rights have to be classified and responsibilities have to be declared to ensure security and minimize the risk of people misusing the system. To define such rulesets, the whole country or nation must transform into a digital community and must be willing to support the same strategy and being part of a connected and collaborative governance system.
How can this enormous System ever work?
For a supportive system on a governmental level we need to define new strategies on decision making processes, on how information is distributed and on how to use this information to govern the people living. This system could be a professional practice model, founded on the cornerstone principles of partnership, equity, accountability, & ownership that form a culturally sensitive & empowering framework, enabling sustainable & accountability-based decisions to support an interdisciplinary design like the shared governance model does. Or a society could implement the principles of self-governance, collaborative governance or a collaborative governance network which combines different approaches of governance and governance systems to address all these requirements. Also, for the decision-making problems there are tools like Intelligent Decision Support Systems or Group Decision Making Models and theories like Participation and the Social-choice theory to either automate the decision-making process or make it more transparent and satisfying for inhabitants. To achieve such a high level of transparency and automation a well-developed information system is needed to process and store all this information.
But how well established are our Systems right now?
As we know, the transition to a new system is very hard, so government stays with the standardization and archiving of processes and documents. They hardly implement new technologies, because of the enormous requirements and the high complexity of such systems. There are some pioneers like Uganda who tries to take advantage of new technologies and their not so well established systems, but they are in an early phase of development. The most advanced e-Government platforms can be found in the Nordic countries. For Matteo Laruffa one thing in Europe is quite clear: “... such a model of governance, which is made only by rules without any role for a democratic policy-making process, imposes a de facto limit on the political rights of European citizens. This means that there is a control exercised by rules over the European citizens rather than a control by the European citizens over rules and policies.” We can therefore indicate, that the systems which the European government relies on is not sufficient anymore and needs improvement for the decision-making processes.
What can we expect in the next five years?
The more you try to implement such systems, the more conflicts between governors and the system will arise, because such a self-organizing system would lower their power of decision making and substitute their positions. The field of strategy & governance in terms of politics will not undergo a big change in the next five years. The incremental process of implementing new strategies and governance archetypes in an organisation like political systems takes much effort, is time consuming and will only take place, if the citizens are willing to be part of this transition. Therefore, we need a skilled workforce of individuals who know how to define goals, strategies and governance models to be able to not only make a change to the systems we use in our day to day lives, also they must know how to communicate and convince the people to adapt to such changes.
