Those that follow this publication know that Reboot is passionate about improving the nature of transactions between citizens and the institutions meant to serve them. From Egypt to the United States to China, we are looking at how these interactions are changing, and how to design that change in a way that leads to improved outcomes.

This focus has led us to Pakistan, a country roughly the size of Chile that generates a disproportionate share of the world’s grim headlines. While we’ve only been here for under a week, our time thus far — spent between Karachi and Islamabad — belies the negative narrative dominating global consciousness. Pakistan certainly has a history of painful strife, yet there are countless reasons to be optimistic about its future. For one, the Pakistani government is serious about expanding access to basic services for a population that has been battered by conflict, natural disaster, and economic despair. For another, there is an able and sizable middle class eager to help steer their country towards positive growth.

As Egyptians head to the polls for a historic constitutional vote, the world watches and waits to understand just how structural long-term changes to the country’s governance system will be. While mainstream media stories focus on admittedly appealing narratives of technology-enabled change, numerous groups and institutions continue to work outside the spotlight to build a new political structure.

Reboot’s focus is on understanding rapidly changing mechanisms of social interaction, and leveraging them for better societies. As practitioners at the intersection of governance, technology, and social science, we help our clients build effective programs and identify optimal investments that will lead to a better future. Developments in MENA in recent weeks provide many examples of the type of systemic change that is possible. Likewise, these events will prove instructive on the larger patterns of social change we are all observing.

How are new communication technologies redefining the form and function of governance? How should these tools mature to more effectively enhance service delivery, improve the outputs of policymaking, and expand access to the political process?

We were privileged to host an event on Monday to discuss these topics and, as it turned out, quite a bit more. We hosted this event in recognition that ‘open-government’ and ‘Gov 2.0 have yet to reach their full potential in practical government applications. Our expert panel and highly engaged audience sought to articulate why this was and what we can do to realize the new opportunities ahead of us in the field of governance. From the nature of participatory government to issues of digital divide and access to education, they proposed ideas on how we can evolve a governance system that isn’t just different, but better.

Design research is foundational to creating products, services, and systems that respond to human needs. In the public and international development sectors, understanding and meeting human needs are critical for improved livelihoods and better governance.

Yet despite its utility, design research is largely overlooked by many institutions important to a well-functioning society. This oversight is unsurprising — the definition, purpose, and role of design research is not well-known. But in collecting the critical data they need to run their programs, these institutions do engage in ‘design research’. The information they gather, however, is purely functional- ‘just good enough’. But a lack of deliberation and formalization in process limits the value of research, and thus the utility of collected data.

The nature of citizen-government interaction is changing. Rhetorically familiar terms like Gov 2.0 and participatory democracy have emerged to describe this shift. Yet for all the exciting developments, from projects like SeeClickFix to OpenStreetMaps, we have yet to formalize an approach for institutions looking to leverage social media in the design and function of government bureaucracies. A critical next step in ‘social media for social change’ will be the maturation of these tools and their expanded, formalized use in political engagement and the delivery of critical services.

“Citizen 2.0: Social Media and the Future of Participatory Government” is thus a conversation not of what’s and why’s, but of when’s and how’s. Hosted by Reboot, this timely session will discuss how to bake the capacities of social media deeply inside government service delivery and policymaking here in the United States and abroad.

We’ve written previously about the potential of mobile banking to help marginalized populations overcome poverty’s debilitating effects. Elsewhere, you can find extensive data on the enormous financial potential of mobile banking. Indeed, the alignment of corporate and development interests in the sector suggests a sustainable, double bottom-line opportunity.

Through strategic cooperation, mobile operators, governments, and financial experts can each achieve their respective goals — profit for the former, improved livelihoods for the latter two — and empower the poor to securely save, better manage day-to-day risk, and seize new opportunities to improve their lives.

Personal Democracy Forum hosted a highly thoughtful conversation at NYU last night. As is their wont, they convened some very bright but divergent minds to discuss Wikileaks and what recent developments in online and offline advocacy suggest about the future of internet freedom.

As it turned out, Wikileaks was only the nominal topic of conversation. Discussion quickly progressed beyond spoiled-on-arrival narratives of press freedom and Julian Assange’s liberty. The conversation was as much about internet rights as it was about the fundamental social contract between citizen and state. If you care about the future, this is the conversation to be having right now.

What does the future of society look like? It’s an audacious question, and one apt to stop many of you from reading further. Yet despite the derision it may welcome, let us remember that productive consideration of this question has brought us many of our most enshrined ideas, from thinkers such as Confucius, Plato, and Sartre. Our clients, through the work they do, ponder this same question in operational contexts every day.

Throughout history, passionate citizens have endeavoured to improve and redefine the nature of society. The rate of change possible in our modern day, however, largely outstrips previous generations. Our new tools are intrinsically additive, and are increasing the opportunities, replicability, and scalability for social change. While techno-utopianism is admittedly dangerous, the ability to fly across the globe in a day, visit the moon, access a vast and ever expanding library of human knowledge from digitized biology to the chemical formula for nuclear energy are indeed changing our societal complexion. The present challenge is to steer change towards constructive rather than deleterious ends.

I had the privilege of engaging in a five-way Twitter debate today with some of the smartest people I know in the open government community. Clay Johnson, Tom Lee, Alex Howard, and Javaun Moradi are all working, in their own ways, to develop a coherent, cohesive, and inclusive vision for the future operating system of American democracy.

Despite the limitations of the medium, we managed to have a substantive conversation about the role of crowdsourcing in the process of collecting public comment on government policies and regulations. The conversation was prompted by the sharing of a blog post by Anil Dash on the White House’s recent ExpertNet initiative.

Many people are working for change these days. Citizens, institutions, and governments alike are enthusiastic about the promise new technologies hold for how we organize ourselves and help one another. In an often troubling and cynical world, such optimism is exciting. Enthusiasm alone, however, is not enough. The next generation of services and systems must be better, not simply different. To achieve such a reality requires more than technological tools; it requires a deep understanding of human behaviour. We started Reboot to bring that capacity to the change process.

The seed for Reboot was planted in March 2010, when we (Zack Brisson and Panthea Lee) met at Transparency Camp to catalyze ‘Gov 2.0’. At the time, Zack’s efforts at the Centre for American Progress were gaining the attention of President Obama, and Panthea was managing child rights initiatives in Iraq and Suriname for UNICEF and researching mobile banking in Afghanistan. We immediately realized we shared inspirations, aspirations, and a penchant for rigorous work. Six months later, Reboot was born.

The birthplace of both paper money and Maoism, China has a long, complex history with capital. Known for both the novelty and the sophistication with which it has managed its resources — from shells to bronze coins to ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’ — China recognized early on that value, once tangibly captured and fungible, holds immense power in shaping and moving society.

Today, China is poised to begin another era of financial innovation. In October 2010, state-owned China Mobile — the world’s largest mobile network operator — acquired a 20 percent stake in the Shanghai Pudong Development Bank, also government controlled. The operator is expected to launch a range of mobile financial services (MFS) nationally this year, and industry watchers predict a dramatic take-off in mobile payments in the near-term. Given that progress in mobile banking across markets is often stifled by inefficiencies between regulator, operator, and service provider, China’s integration of the three is intriguing and opens up new possibilities. In addition, with mobile penetration high (64 percent and growing) and bank card penetration relatively low, as well as accumulated experience from various recent pilots, 2011 indeed looks promising for MFS growth in China.

Cities have critical information needs.

To reach their potential, communities require efficient information exchange among multiple stakeholders. But with communication channels increasingly fragmented, individual entities struggle to get their information to the right audiences in a timely manner.

This creates a reality where citizens expertise, labor, and capital are infrequently used, let alone optimized, in serving the needs of their communities. There are several reasons for this. One is a lack of meaningful opportunities to engage on issues that serve citizens’ self interest — people find it hard to understand how to make a difference in the issues they’re interested in. Even if citizens do try and input on a certain issue, there is often a lack of feedback. Without worthwhile returns on investment, the chances of future civic engagement drop. Finally, there is a lack of information on how to self-organize to solve civic problems, and few resources to turn enthusiasm into meaningful action.

We’ve recently been pondering the question of how innovation and service delivery are facilitated in real world markets. This is a particularly sticky question in the development industry, where significant “search friction” occurs.

To address the problem, we’ve come up with a theoretical approach based on making supply and demand more efficiently organized when connecting funders with development service providers.

We’ve wrapped this theory up as a submission for Nokia’s Africa Innovation Summit. From the proposal:

“”Introducing the Development Score, an index or ‘credit score for groups working for social impact. The Score considers both objective and subjective measures of a given supplier/do-gooder’s methodology, successes, and overall accountability, with the algorithm/metrics determined by a group of experts in development, business, and public service.”

One presentation that perked my ears at the recent Columbia Institute for Tele-Information’s Mobile Money II Conference was by Judith Mariscal of CIDE, a Mexican social science research centre. In examining literature on mobile money vis-a-vis data from select deployments, Mariscal and research partner Ernesto M Flores-Roux found that many of mobile banking’s accepted maxims don’t always hold. Their resulting “The Enigma of Mobile Money” [presentation and paper], which Mariscal presented at Mobile Money II, thus tempers the oft breathless enthusiasm for mobile as holy grail for the poor and unbanked.

To date, we’ve seen relatively few mobile banking home runs — currently, of nearly 100 deployments worldwide, only 10 can claim over one million users — thus, Mariscal noted, our understanding of what it takes to succeed in mobile banking is patchy at best and a more critical eye towards industry truisms is warranted. Some common myths addressed by Mariscal and Flores-Roux:

Many of the worlds poorest live without access to basic banking services such as savings, insurance, payment services, and basic credit. Those in the developed world often take these services for granted without realizing their contributions to secure, productive livelihoods. Savings allow us to decrease our risk in handling cash and insurance allows us to protect against economic shocks; payment services allow us to save time that can be spent in more productive ways and basic credit allows us to use current assets to capitalize on future opportunities.

Half the global population, however, lives without such services, or at least without such services as enjoyed by the majority of the developed world. The percentage of households that are financially excluded increases to 80 percent when looking at Africa. Traditionally unattractive to commercial banks, low-income populations are forced to seek out alternative service providers, often at great financial burden and opportunity cost to themselves.

I recently appeared on the Arabic language news network al-Hurra to talk about the role of the media in inter-faith dialogue. With current tensions between American foreign policy and the Muslim world at an all-time high, it’s no surprise that the US government funded network takes an interest in the topic.

There was a common assumption underlying all the questions I was asked. The proposition was that our ever expanding and globally interconnected media ecosystem is fostering inter-faith dialogue and understanding. This is certainly an optimistic pronouncement coming from those with an interest in seeing reality as such. Unfortunately, I feel that our current media have failed to deliver on this promise.

The reality of today is that people often dig deeper into their established and preferred worldview. MoveOn.org co-founder Eli Pariser has coined the term “filter bubbles” to describe our increased tendency to ignore content that challenges our opinions. Using newly possible online filters to block out dissonant views — whether intentionally or not — we are able to stay within our comfortable, bubble-view of the world.