Are our institutions for global problem-solving broken? The recent failure to secure a meaningful climate change deal in Copenhagen and the global financial crisis suggest that existing global institutions require extensive rewiring. Decades of economic development, integration of product and service markets, cross-border travel and new technologies enabling virtual interaction have created a world that is much more complex and bottom-up than top-down. Yet, too many efforts to solve global issues such as climate change [...]

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French President, Nicolas Sarkozy, gave the opening address to Davos yesterday. His message: this is not just a global financial crisis; it is a crisis of globalization. My overall assessment of his talk: A good job diagnosing the problems with today’s economy, but Sarkozy offers little in the way of novel or innovative solutions. Not surprisingly, he was very critical of bankers and financial power brokers who have rigged the system to extract maximum profits for [...]

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As part of a multi-year research effort to understand how wikinomics and web 2.0 was changing the nature of government and democracy, my research associates and I argued that governments–perhaps more than any other institution–could benefit enormously from broad-based shift to cloud computing. That idea is gathering steam and in some leading jurisdictions it’s becoming a reality. Where most governments build mainframes and buy expensive software, a growing number of IT leaders in government are consolidating computing [...]

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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 [...]

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Google’s clash with China raises some more fundamental questions. It’s now been 20 years since the June 4th incident in Tiananmen and political change has been, as Mao predicted, “like crossing a river, feeling for the pebbles one at a time.” The question, over the long term, is whether the ghosts of Tiananmen will come back to haunt China in ways its leadership could not have predicted. Just as India aspires to be more than the [...]

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My quote of the day comes straight out of a political science textbook, but it rings so true today: “The lesson that capitalist countries needed to combine the efficiency of markets with the broader values of community … did not come to them easily. It took the calamitous collapse of the Victorian era of globalization — into worldwide war, followed by extreme left wing revolution in Russia, extreme right wing revolution in Italy and Germany, [...]

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Open Forum Europe 2009 is another highlight in a lengthing list of engagements this spring. I will giving a keynote, along with Vint Cerf,  at what promises to be a lively dialogue between the open source community and European policy-makers. Open standards and open source software already enjoy widespread support in Europe, particularly among governments who fear the influence of Microsoft and other proprietary software vendors. So this year’s conference will examine some of the issues [...]

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I’ve been invited to give a talk at Georgetown University on April 16th as part of its public policy dialogue series. The talk is open to the public, but space is limited so RRSP soon if you’d like to attend. Here’s a summary: From its first few weeks in office, the new administration has emphasized the need for innovation in the public sector and called for dramatically more productive, equitable and transparent services. Fortunately, new [...]

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I was on the Agenda with Steve Paikin last Friday discussing transparency in government along with Maryantonett Flumian,  a professor of public and international affairs at the University of Ottawa, Leslie Harris, president of the Center for Democracy and Technology, and Globe and Mail columnist Mathew Ingram (Ingram 2.0).  You can view the replay below.

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The right to make freedom of information requests is in enshrined in most democratic countries (Wikipedia says 70 countries have such legislation). But how often is that right actually invoked? My guess is that it’s vastly underutilized and that most members of the public would be surprised to know what they could find out  if only they asked. Part of the issue is that few people are aware of the appropriate process for filing a [...]

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