It has shifted priorities in our University, our families and our future career choices. It has hit hard millions of people all around the world. “It” is the financial crisis, the Great Recession.
One of the places hit first and hardest was Iceland. During the last 20 years, Iceland metamorphosed from a fishing nation to a fantastic economic success, borne up by their financial services and technology sectors. But in 2008 the country went virtually bankrupt in the wake of the financial crisis, leaving the government and the Icelandic people with massive debt.
Public anger flared at Icelandic politicians, who encouraged risky financial investments, and riots broke out in the streets. And among it all, over drinks at a bar, a group of Icelandic entrepreneurs saw an opportunity to rebuild, redesign and reboot the country.
Enter the Ministry of Ideas, a grassroots think-tank founded just weeks after “It” happened. Described by some as “crowd-sourcing wikinomics,” it consists of a National Assembly of citizens, an online idea-platform and a weekly radio show that brings in a 40 percent national listenership. The Ministry of Ideas connects citizens to cooperatively rethink core values and brainstorm ways to sustainably rebuild the country. We interviewed Gunnar Hólmsteinn, an Icelandic entrepreneur who is part of the core team of the Ministry of Ideas and founder of the web-media company CLARA.
The first National Assembly convened in November of 2009 and drew 1,500 people, or 0.5 percent of Iceland's population. A full 1,200 participants were chosen by a random sample of Iceland's population registry; like jury duty to rebuild a nation from ashes. This sampling method promotes radical collaboration. Including a representative sample of the entire population extends this exercise of social innovation from niche activism to larger civic duty. The Ministry of Ideas is focused on putting ideas in front of and connecting to the “right people”—mainly politicians and authorities in various fields who can make things happen.
Structure is key in making sense of hundreds and thousands of ideas. The participants of the National Assembly were divided into 180 working groups led by well-trained facilitators.
How does one decipher the 1,500 voices, even if they are in structured groups? Hólmsteinn's CLARA technology in part made this possible; the information-aggregator scanned the postings from each of the Assembly's working groups and automatically summarized the discussion in word clouds. These word clouds were then matched to words from speeches of Icelandic politicians.
Given the ire towards Icelandic politicians, one could imagine the comparison would further spotlight shortcomings of government. However, the Ministry of Ideas focused on the positive, encouraging politicians whose past language and ideas already matched well with the values and goals from the National Assembly.
Encouraging politicians in their work at a time when Iceland is fraught with frustration is a commendable, if controversial action. After all, effective engagement of the government, as demonstrated by the Ministry of Ideas, is necessary in bringing about national-level change.
Is the Ministry of Ideas online platform all that different than Duke's recently launched Changeworks, or Ashoka's Changemakers, both online social innovation idea forums? Changeworks and Changemakers both run on a competition model; people and organizations post their ideas—Duke's own WISER recently ran in an Ashoka Changemakers competition—other users vote, and the winners receive seed funding to support their endeavor.
But a self-selecting population, likely already steeped in social entrepreneurship, logs on to Changeworks or Changemakers. By contrast, the Ministry of Ideas is representative by design. While self-selection remains a factor to some extent, the Ministry of Ideas reaches beyond the young-techy-idealist crowd. In fact, if anything, they had problems getting young people to agree to attend the 9 a.m. National Assembly.
And yet, it has only been four months since the National Assembly. Hólmsteinn described how the Ministry of Ideas drew inspiration from Obama's idea-rich and web-savvy “White House II.” To bring the comparison further, how might the example of Iceland's Ministry of Ideas inform Obama's newly established Office of Social Innovation? Now that the ebullient Obama-inspired enthusiasm has begun to fizzle, the Administration must learn to produce results without energy fueled primarily by idealism. The same goes for the Ministry of Ideas as they endeavor to transition from a survival instinct of a dissatisfied Iceland to an ingrained civic duty.
Lina Feng and Cami Ratliffe are Trinity seniors. Their column is an online exclusive.
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