Rebooting Iceland with Wikinomics

Less than four weeks after Lehman Brothers collapsed on September 15, 2008, Iceland became one of the first and most dramatic national casualties of the global financial crisis. Its three largest banks had all been nationalized. Its government was driven from office. The national debt skyrocketed and the value of its currency plummeted as mass unemployment and inflation brought the whole economy to a virtual standstill.

It appeared that Iceland, once considered a rising star, was teetering on the verge of bankruptcy. Indeed, if not for leniency on the part of the Dutch and British governments, (who bailed out private investors to the tune of 3.8 billion euros), the country would be practically insolvent today.

Iceland is now slowly recovering from the crisis, although local officials estimate that the crash has set the country back five to six years in its development. The need for reinvention is evidently paramount. But where will the new ideas come from? How about rebooting Iceland with a little wikinomics?

According to an intriguing article in De Spiegel, Iceland’s crisis is allowing new people rise to prominence and making room for new ideas. One of the players in this new era is Gudjon Mar Gudjonsson, a fan of wikinomics and founder of the Ministry of Ideas (Hugmyndaráðuneytið), an open forum for promoting of innovations in industry, education, economics, and society.

Here’s a clip from the article:

In mid-November Gudjonsson invited about 1,500 Icelanders to a kind of national assembly in Reykjavik. He wanted them to debate the country’s future, to discuss values and what makes Iceland special. The idea, Gudjonsson says, was to capitalize on the “wisdom of the crowd,” as he calls it.

“The recovery (of the government) is about the past,” he says. “We are about the future.”

Gudjonsson thinks countries ought be run more like companies. He says Wikipedia — not the Encyclopedia Britannica, Linux and not Windows — is the business model for the 21st century. He wants a society that communicates via Facebook and Twitter, has ideas and can put good ideas into practice. He models himself not on Margaret Thatcher, but on Barack Obama.

[Today] he’s busy enthusing about “wikinomics” and the “renaissance plan” that is to be put into practice in April next year to “reboot” Iceland … Society would have been forced to change anyway, he says. The crisis just made the change more urgent.