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Government can't ignore open source any longer

Tags:
Government,
George Osborne,
Open Source

George Osborne, shadow chancellor

Published: 08 Mar 2007 14:17 GMT

... Conservative websites that I find most exciting. It is the unofficial ones. Take Conservativehome.com. It's an online community of Conservative activists that engages in a constant commentary on what the Conservative Party leadership is up to.

Although I, and other Shadow Cabinet members, am frequently the target of Conservativehome.com, it is for me unambiguously a good thing that it exists. For it — and other websites like Iain Dale's blog and the new Conservative internet TV station 18 Doughty Street — are sure signs of the health of the Conservative movement.

Nothing like it exists on the government side. Why? Because you simply couldn't imagine the current Labour leaders working with a website where Labour supporters took potshots at them. This will surely have to change.

Top-down politics is no longer sustainable in a bottom-up age. There are some who say that blogs and online petitions merely give a platform to the angry activist — what has been called the voices of "shrill outrage". Here, I disagree. Of course it provides another channel for the activist, shrill-voiced or otherwise. But it's also opening up politics to people who would never ordinarily engage with politicians or mainstream political parties.

Look at what happened in Los Angeles last year: 500,000 people took part in a march to complain about the treatment of illegal immigrants. It was one of the biggest marches ever in American history, and it was organised through online social-networking sites, rather than by trade unions or pressure groups.

So the marchers weren't the usual hardened political activists — they were mostly non-voters, students and immigrants. Exactly the type of people that conventional politics usually fails to reach.

So as people come to be increasingly disengaged from traditional models of political engagement, these new technologies and social networks gives us in politics and in government an opportunity to connect with and listen to new audiences, as well as engage with old ones. It's too great an opportunity to be missed.

The final pillar of this new political settlement is open source. Last week I went to hear my friend Professor Jeff Sachs deliver the first Reith Lecture. He talked about open-source politics. Open-source politics means rejecting the old monolithic top-down approach to decision-making. It means throwing open the doors and listening to new ideas and new contributors. It means harnessing the power of mass collaboration. And rather than relying on the input of a few trusted experts, it means drawing on the skills and expertise of millions.

The most well-known example of open source is Wikipedia, the online encyclopaedia. As I am sure you know, every one of its entries is created, edited, corrected and updated by the online community. The idea stands on its head the concept of the traditional encyclopaedia written by the most learned experts in its field.

I congratulate the RSA [Royal Society of Arts] on recognising the power of this approach. You have just launched your own "wiki", enabling your Fellows to contribute ideas for future research projects, and allowing them to comment on ongoing projects. Companies are now increasingly using "wikis" to solve internal problems — because you can have lots of people working on them at once. Those people don't necessarily have to work for the company. This is a radical departure from our traditional understanding of the business model.

Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams, authors of a fascinating new book called Wikinomics, use a Canadian gold mining company called Goldcorp to illustrate this point. Goldcorp's CEO was frustrated that his in-house geologists couldn't accurately work out where new gold deposits might be, so he did something...