TECHNOLOGY AND THE BUSINESS OF GOVERNMENT

Another thing they have in common is that each of them reflects the abiding principle of self-governance. No central authority told Gates and Buffett to establish and fund a philanthropic organization. As Senge points out in his book, nobody is telling a raft of companies to adopt green policies; they are doing it on their own. Nobody told ordinary citizens in Myanmar and China to organize efforts to relieve suffering caused by natural disasters - in fact, the volunteers engaged in these activities risk incurring the wrath of their governments. Nobody told private companies and state governments to support embryonic stem cell research - on the contrary, the Bush administration is doing whatever it can to repress it.

The trend toward self-governance is growing exponentially thanks to the technology-based phenomenon of social networking. Wikipedia provides the most obvious example of the ability of large numbers of ordinary people to employ collaborative technologies to do great things.

This trend has huge potential impacts on government. There has always been a debate over the boundaries of government. At the time of the founding of the American Republic, Thomas Paine said: "That government is best which governs least." With the onset of the Great Depression, the prevailing philosophy switched to, "That government is best which governs most." Over the past few decades, we have experienced a see-saw effect of governments alternatively over-governing and under-governing.

Since the outset of the Reagan administration in the early 1980s, a conscious attempt was made to shrink government by outsourcing as much federal work as possible. Office of Management and Budget Circular A-76 was the vehicle employed to do this. A-76 holds that government shouldn't be in the business of business. Why should government provide printing services, motor pool services, and food services, when these lie properly in the domain of private companies?

On the surface, this approach makes sense. However, in retrospect we see that it has had a number of unintended consequences. One of the unfortunate consequences of A-76 is that as technical skills were contracted out to private contractors, the federal government experienced a technology hollowing within its ranks. There are serious questions whether the federal government today has in-house technical capabilities to enable it to do its job properly.

The explosive growth of social networking should make us pause to take stock of how we define the boundaries of government. Single-minded outsourcing through A-76 may be missing the point. Rather than debating whether printing services should be offered by government employees, we should be focused instead on the opportunities for self-governance that are emerging, as reflected in countless self-governance experiences with phenomena such as Wikipedia, Flickr, and LinkedIn.

Who knows how successful self-governance efforts will be? After 10 years of experimenting with them, we may conclude that most of them will flop. Still, current success with a number of social networking experiences raises the intriguing possibility that the basic nature of political governance will be altered by the rising phenomenon of self-governance. As a consequence, government 10 to 20 years from now may look very different from government today.