PANEL: Digital Technology — Tools for Social Change
Master of Ceremonies: Frank Moss, Director of the MIT Media Lab
Panelists:
Joshua Schachter, Google engineer
Jeffrey Friedberg, Chief Trust Architect, Microsoft
Jimmy Wales, Founder of Wikipedia
Dr. Howard Gardner, Harvard University psychologist
Dr. John Henry Clippinger, Co-director of the Law Lab, Harvard University
Martin Varsavsky, Argentinian entrepreneur
Panel summary by Josh Sanburn, World Policy Journal
Today, it is commonly accepted that the Internet has created the foundations for the possibility of possessing collective human knowledge. The question the panel of professors, entrepreneurs, and computer and software engineers addressed was how to turn that wisdom into collective action.
Joshua Schachter, a Google software engineer, said there’s an increasing opportunity to organize people to solve common problems together, like access to health care, lack of education, and poverty. “People acting in their own interest is great,” Schachter said. “But can we get everybody to chime in and do something that’s useful?”
A couple panelists referred to “wiki government,” a concept first brought forth in a book by Beth Simone Novack, that argues for a better government through collaborative democracy. “Can we find issues that are important, where there’s a lot of expertise, and then mobilize it in such a way that the expertise can be used without a group or person dominating the ultimate outcome?” asked Dr. Howard Gardner. He cited an argument laid out in Novack’s book, Wiki Government: How Technology Can Make Government Better, that the U.S. patent office could use the broader community to help approve patents.
The idea of a wiki government obviously came from the platform created by Wikipedia, whose founder, Jimmy Wales, discussed how informal learning is helping advance societies around the world. “Young people are following passions of interest and joining networks of people,” Wales said. “Young people are reading Wikipedia, and it’s the most exciting thing in the world to them. It’s an encyclopedia. I think that’s a major change and a really positive sign.”
Wales said he believes today’s younger generation is more engaged in education, politics, and science than any other previous generation, largely due to the availability of knowledge online. But when it comes to collective action, Wales dismissed the idea that Wikipedia itself would push a certain agenda.
“Maybe a political party, a centrist party, could say, ‘We’re going to look for the solutions, and we’re going to use the Wiki platform to do that.'” said Dr. John Clippinger, who works on identity issues and fraud issues in collaboration with Microsoft. “How do you build networks of trust?” he asked. Answering his own question, Clippinger suggested more efficient governance mechanisms but cited high coordination costs.
Martin Varsavasky has worked on education and the Internet in Argentina and said that a number of his countrymen view the web as a source of destruction or as a waste of time due to its unpredictable and uncontrollable nature. But the country has begun integrating the Internet into education curriculums, which includes online exercises for students.
“We are finding over time, what is the role of the Internet in education, through trial and error,” he said. “This is a subject that no one has answered yet.”