Tag Archives: Eric Raymond

The Open Source Public Service

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Consider these to quotes side by side:

First,

“Human beings generally take pleasure in a task when it falls in a sort of optimal-challenge zone; not so easy as to be boring, not too hard to achieve. A happy programmer is one who is neither underutilized nor weighed down with ill-formulated goals and stressful process friction. Enjoyment predicts efficiency.

Relating to your own work process with fear and loathing (even in the displacing, ironic way suggested by hanging up Dilbert cartoons) should therefore be regarded in itself as a sign that the process has failed. Joy, humor, and playfulness are indeed assets…”

– Eric Raymond, The Cathedral & The Bazaar

(BTW: Who would have thought that the entire line of Dilbert cartoons – their humorous reflections on how organizations (dis)function – could be made depressingly painful in one brief phrase.)

Second,

“Disability claims and stress leaves are soaring. For many public service managers, the work-life balance is so unhealthy that one major federal department has tried to implement a BlackBerry ban between 7 p.m. and 7 a.m., so that people can reclaim some of their personal time. Management scholars are using the public service as a laboratory to study workplace dysfunction…

…The discussion about public service renewal is ongoing, but one valuable contribution arrived this week. In a report released Wednesday, the Public Policy Forum, an Ottawa-based think tank, succinctly identifies some of the key problems facing the public service. Few of these observations are likely to surprise Ottawa insiders, but it’s useful all the same to see them legitimized by respected researchers.

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The report confirms, for example, public servants feel so tangled up in procedure and regulations they are unable to get meaningful work done… Yes, public servants need to be accountable, especially in the post-Gomery universe, but if the “web of rules” is completely extinguishing every spark of innovation and producing the most risk-averse organization in the country, then there’s a problem.”

– The Ottawa Citizen Editorial Board

The narrative of the public service as a byzantine, rule bound place has become so accepted it is now unquestioned gosple. The truth is always more complicated. I know of, and occasionally hear from, people who work in places where (usually small) teams of public servants work in flat collaborative groups that are able to achieve great things. But the narrative exists for a reason – as the above Ottawa Citizen piece attests. This is why where you work in the public service (and often who you work for) is far more important than what file you work on.

So how much work in the public service falls within the optimal-challenge zone described by Raymond? More importantly, how many public servants would continue to do their job if they weren’t paid? 10%? 35%? 50%?

My suspicion is that the open source community for public policy is actually quite large. It includes those in the public service – who are tied up and tied down in their silos, but also extends much further. The problem is that it is tied down by process and an industrial model to “churning out” policy that doesn’t work well with today’s knowledge workers.

Canada25 showed that hundreds and indeed thousands of young people wanted to think about, engage in, and write about public policy in their spare time. All we did was allow them to focus on whatever they wanted and create as frictionless a process as possible. The result? Four well received policy papers in 6 years on top of numerous smaller projects, debates, discussion groups and countless other outcomes I don’t even know about.

The main point is that “open” can work in policy development. So maybe it is time to set the public service free? To allow policy analysts to self-organize and focus their attention to where they believe they can best contribute, rather than having hundreds if not thousands of them babysitting files that simple don’t move?

Why not treat policy challenges like open source software programs. Create a policyforge (modeled after sourceforge) where the policy can reside and where the module policy owner, can foster a community and accept its ideas, opinions and edits.

Will it work? I can’t guarantee it. But we’d better start experimenting because the one thing we do know. The current system is beginning to crack.

The Public Service as a Gift Economy

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In his description of why Open Source works Eric Raymond notes that open source communities don’t operate as command hierarchies or even as exchange economies. Instead they often operate as gift economies:

Gift cultures are adaptations not to scarcity but to abundance. They arise in populations that do not have significant material-scarcity problems with survival goods… Abundance makes command relationships difficult to sustain and exchange relationships an almost pointless game. In gift cultures, social status is determined not by what you control but by what you give away.

What is interesting about the public service is that it, in theory, could operate like an open source gift economy. Indeed, there are no survival necessities for those who work in the public service – their salaries are generally acceptable and their jobs secure.

This isn’t to say scarcity doesn’t exist within the public service. But it is driven by two variables – neither of which is intrinsically scarce – but have been made so by the public service’s cultural history and industrial structure.

giftThe first is resources, which are siloed into various functions and cannot allocate themselves to problems without the consent of a centralized administrator.

The second is information, which for primarily historical corporate cultural reasons is rarely shared, and is hoarded in order to maintain control over resources or agendas.

Neither of this are necessary for the public service to function. Indeed, it would function a whole lot more efficiently and effectively if such a scarcity model were abandoned. This is why I’ve been such an advocate for a social networking system within the public service – it would serve as a clearing house to allow information and resources (people) to move around the system more freely and allocate itself more efficiently.

Such a clearing house would reduce the benefits of hoarding information, as it would be increasingly difficult to leverage information into control over an agenda or resource. Instead the opposite incentive system would take over. Sharing information or your labour (as a gift) within the public service would increase your usefulness to, and reputation among, others within the system. Nor would this mean political actors at the centre of this system would have to abandon agenda control – a central authority can still have enourmous influence ascribing value to what should be worked on. It would simply no longer have absolute authority over that agenda (It is worth noting that under the current model this absolute agenda power is merely theoretical anyway – public servants have an amazing ability of doing whatever the hell they want regardless who which party is setting the agenda).

Indeed, the above contrast also explains, in part, the challenge around recuiting. As gift styled economies become more prevalent, the command hierarchy model of the public service is becoming an increasingly undesirable system within which to reside.

Update: Think a gift economy built around reputation and recognition still doesnt make sense? The Ottawa Citizen’s Katheryn May recently noted that “The “churn” of the public service, characterized by the rapid and high turnover of people in jobs, has been identified as a big problem. The APEX survey showed 64 per cent of executives think of leaving their organization at least every month. More than half want to leave because of lack of recognition. (H/T to CPRenewal)”