Open Government

Chapter 4. The Single Point of Failure

Beth Simone Noveck

The world is full of amateurs: gifted amateurs, devoted amateurs. You can pick almost any group that has any kind of intrinsic interest in it, from dragonflies to pill bugs to orb-weaving spiders. Anybody can pick up information in interesting places, find new species or rediscover what was thought to be a vanished species, or some new biological fact about a species already known.

—E. O. Wilson

The patent system is just one example of how government institutions create single points of failure by concentrating decision-making power in the hands of the few, whether legislators in Congress, cabinet officials in the executive branch, or bureaucrats in agencies. Administrative practices are constructed around the belief that government professionals know best how to translate broad legislative mandates into specific regulatory decisions in the public interest. Governance, the theory goes, is best entrusted to a bureaucracy operating at one remove from the pressure of electoral politics and the biased influence of the public at large.

Note

This chapter is an excerpt from Wiki Government: How Technology Can Make Government Better, Democracy Stronger, and Citizens More Powerful, Beth Simone Noveck, Brookings Institution Press, 2009.

The Closed Model of Decision Making

The rationale for this closed model of decision making, as explained by such theorists as Max Weber and Walter Lippmann, is rooted in the assumptions of an earlier age. ...