Matt Harrison, from the Prometheus Institute, began his talk with a discussion of the theoretical underpinnings behind the work of The Prometheus Institute. The work of the Institute is oriented by two central premises: first, that technology facilitates evolution, and second, that policy needs evolution. In this case, evolution is taken to mean adaptive self-organization, where the basic evolutionary mechanism is a progression through three steps: differentiation, selection and amplification. Harrison suggests that policy is not evolving rapidly enough because of legal and technical barriers--like opacity, perpetuity and monopoly--that impede progress, and that new technologies offer tools for improving self-organization and hastening evolution.

The elements of self-organization, from Harrison’s viewpoint, include a decentralized power structure, strong feedback mechanisms, and open flow of ideas and information, and complexity. Free entry and exit are also important, both in the marketplace and with respect to tools of self-organization themselves.

The status quo, which Harrison terms Government 2.0, offers an illustration of how not to effectively advance self-organization. Established tools and forums too often give voice to existing political constituencies or let people pick any policy (rather than from among a menu of options). In Harrison’s view, tools of the future should be less like MySpace (the ultra-customizable social networking site), and more like StockOverflow, a site that enables experts to respond to users’ questions and develop a personal reputation through submitting successful answers. In fact, those looking to advance self-organization have a lot to learn from successful open-source projects (like Linux and Wikipedia), which often have substantial restrictions on how much change each person can make to the central content of the project.

Next, Harrison outlined what he sees as Government 3.0, or the new science of policy evolution. From his perspective, it is important to replace the left/right and liberal/conservative divides with a broader spectrum organized along degrees of decentralization or centralization. One way to achieving this could be to digitally modulize government barriers and solutions, and thereby improve the flow of feedback to the state. Rather than just evaluating elected politicians through the voting process, he argues, we could evaluate laws and regulations directly.

DIY Democracy, a project of The Prometheus Institute, offers an interesting example of a technology-based tool for encouraging policy evolution. DIY Democracy essentially connects iPhone users to government officials, administrators and bureaucrats who are actually implementing policies and procedures, and who therefore may be more responsive to citizens’ concerns than more conventional outlets (i.e. Congressmen’s offices). Anybody can download the app and begin campaigns on issues that are important to them; the platform facilitates self-organization of people with similar concerns and enables people to communicate their concerns to the appropriate member of government. The platform uses a points-based social incentive to encourage user participation, which seems to be effective in differentiating those with successful advocacy records.

Riding on a spate of recent successes, DIY Democracy has ambitious goals for growth. Success stories to date include the successful re-structuring of a street in Los Angeles to improve traffic flow and a perception of improved police legitimacy in Redlands due to the ease of registering cases of police misconduct directly with the police commissioner. This tool already offers a promising option for nudging government toward hyper-local, choice-based policy experimentation. Through a forthcoming update, however, the platform will soon enable users to challenge public expenditures and budgets line by line, improving citizen oversight of officials’ salaries and other spending. As DIY Democracy expands nationally, onto Android and Blackberry phones, and into other countries (including Brazil, Nigeria and Italy) in the near future, Harrison and The Prometheus Institute hope that the platform and others like it develop an even greater potential to improve policymaking at all levels of government.