OII Politics and the Internet Seminar Series

Designing the Smarter State

About

How do we combat a global public health crisis? Ensure the safety and efficacy of a drug or product? Deliver and allocate benefits and services to the public? Government professionals do not have access to unlimited informational resources or the insights to answer all these questions. Yet technology may be making it possible to find people with relevant expertise and solicit their know how – crowdsourcing wisely not only widely. From posting a resume on LinkedIn to earning a badge for honest salesmanship on eBay, digital tools are making it easier to express our expertise whether credentials, skills or interests and track experience, including work completed, milestones accomplished, tasks and challenges undertaken, and time spent on an activity. Now a patient about to undergo surgery or the policymaker about to set a rule can find the surgeon who has done the procedure successfully not simply the doctor with the higher ranked degree. In order to match the demand to the available supply of talent for tackling public problems and re-design our institutions of governance to govern smarter, we need to understand: how to define and make findable the skills, talents, and different kinds of intelligence that if managed well could transform society.