From: Anders Sandberg (asa@nada.kth.se)
Date: Sat Jul 13 2002 - 17:14:44 MDT
Mark Walker:
>Not a bad idea. It would probably make sense to target local governments
>first--probably a little less institutional inertia.
Yes. The charm is that it can be tried on a small scale and prove itself
before being scaled up too. No need to do it top-down.
>One worry is that
>this still does not address the problem of motivating the insiders to
>get the ideas to work. As anyone who has a business knows, a lot of the
>problem is figuring out the good from the bad ideas, and then even then
>the best ideas often require a lot of tweaking and fine-tuning before
>they work. This is often where most of the hard work lies--how do we
>motivate those on the inside to do this? My experience is that most (but
>not all) employees absolutely loath change.
True. My father ran the suggestions section of Scandinavian
Airlines Systems many years ago (this is where I got the idea from
in the first place), and he had to spend far too much time making
executives actually implement improvements. In an open society (as
opposed to the fairly closed culture of a company) there are
fortunately more forces badgering employees and administrators when
an inefficiency has been discovered.
The organization handling the evaluation of the suggestions also has
to be able to interface well with other departments/organizations: it
is nothing that will automagically work. There is likely a need for
someone to both ask the uncomfortable questions ("So why can't this
be done?") and to propose the less liked changes. This is likely the
weakest part of my scheme. Having an organization external to
government handle the thing might actually be an advantage, but limit
access.
On Sat, Jul 13, 2002 at 01:16:17PM -0700, Osher Doctorow wrote:
>
> Excellent idea, Anders! When do we start implementing it?
Thanks! Right away! I'm trying it out on my lawyer and politician
friends, refining it. I think there is a realistic chance I can at
least get some of the municipal politicians here to think about it,
and in any case a better writeup might spread further.
-- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Anders Sandberg Towards Ascension! asa@nada.kth.se http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/ GCS/M/S/O d++ -p+ c++++ !l u+ e++ m++ s+/+ n--- h+/* f+ g+ w++ t+ r+ !y
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