G eorge Bernard Shaw once wrote, "All professions are conspiracies against the laity," and nowhere is this more the case than in a democracy. Although political legitimacy demands accountability to an electoral process, those living in a democracy readily submit to what sociologist Michael Schudson calls the "permanent embarrassment" of expertise. We believe that administrative governance by a professional elite is the best way to organize decision-making in the public interest. Experts decide on acceptable levels of mercury emissions in the air, anti-discrimination rules in education and the workplace, and the standards for cross-ownership of newspapers and broadcasting stations.

The justification for this professional decision-making, articulated by theorists ranging from Max Weber to Walter Lippmann, is that while citizens can express personal opinions based on values, they are incapable of making fact-based decisions on matters of policy. For Weber, the complexities of modern governance call for "the personally detached and strictly objective expert." Only institutionalized and governmental professionals possess the expertise, resources, discipline, and time to make public-policy decisions. And citizen participation is hard to organize and administer, and even harder to scale. It is one thing for 10 bureaucrats to debate a policy and come to an informed consensus; try getting the same result with 10,000 people–or 10 million.

Now, however, new technology may be changing the relationship between democracy and expertise, affording an opportunity to improve competence by making good information available for better governance. Large-scale knowledge-sharing projects, such as the Wikipedia online encyclopedia, and volunteer software-programming initiatives, such as the Apache Webserver (which runs two-thirds of the websites in the world), demonstrate the inadequacy of our assumptions about expertise in the twenty-first century. Ordinary people, regardless of institutional affiliation or professional status, possess information–serious, expert, fact-based, scientific information–to enhance decision-making, information not otherwise available to isolated bureaucrats. Partly as a result of the simple tools now available for collaboration and partly as a result of a highly mobile labor market of "knowledge workers," people are ready and willing to share that information across geographic, disciplinary, and institutional boundaries.

Consider how communal pooling of knowledge is already at work. An individual may submit the first "stub" about the history of the Ming Dynasty or the biography of Winston Churchill in Wikipedia, and a wider community of millions collaborates on writing, editing, and refining every article. Wikipedia is open enough to allow expertise to emerge, but it is also structured enough, with outlines and to-do lists, to set the rules for a certain kind of group collaboration–and that collaboration is producing high-quality results.

Or take sites that utilize self-reinforcing "reputation" systems to improve quality and reliability. These so-called social-networking sites–like Dopplr for travelers, LinkedIn for business professionals, or Facebook and MySpace–use community rating and friend-of-a-friend (FOAF) accreditation mechanisms to build the reputation and trust necessary to form knowledge groups and communities. Making expertise relevant for the complex processes of policy-making also requires forming communities that can collaborate, but it goes beyond that. It demands "civic networking," tools designed for groups to transform data into knowledge useful to decision-makers, as well as the concomitant institutional practices designed to make use of that knowledge.

Political philosophers from Aristotle to Rousseau to Rawls have suggested that when groups engage in the public exchange of reason, they produce better ideas. In practice, however, more talk usually slows decision-making and comes with the attendant problem of groupthink. Increasingly, however, we are discovering how to use computers to enable deliberation without endless talk and without having to be in the same room. And those structures–enforced through software–are what transform the subjective, free-wheeling, dynamic expertise of amateurs into effective communities of experts.

For example, the Omidyar Network, the philanthropy launched by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar, asks the public to participate in awarding its grants. Rather than invite submissions from thousands of individuals–which would have strained resources to review–the Omidyar Network created an online framework for the interested community to deliberate and winnow the proposals first. Or consider New Assignment, which was launched to demonstrate that "open collaboration over the Internet among reporters, editors and large groups of users can produce high-quality work that serves the public interest, holds up under scrutiny, and builds trust." The site set forth the social practices to elicit collaborative reporting (instead of collaborative gossip-mongering), resulting in the publication of seven original essays and 80 interviews, as well as a series of stories about collaborative journalism for Wired magazine. While this fell short of the number of pieces the organizers had wanted, New Assignment still enabled the "crowd" to produce stories as good as any found in a national magazine and demonstrated how to organize (and how not) the process. Similarly, the Sense.us program at the University of California–Berkeley provides public mechanisms to allow people across disciplinary boundaries to collaborate in making, and thereby making sense of, census data graphs and charts. And the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) is taking this idea to the next level: connecting experts directly to actual decision-making in the "Peer-to-Patent" project.

In each case, we are beginning to see how, if designed with clear, simple tasks to that help create more open and collaborative yet organized practices, the computer screen can shift power from professional sources of authoritative knowledge to new kinds of knowledge networks. Speaking truth to power is easiest to do–and more accurate–when spoken not as an individual, but as a group. This has particular application to policymaking: Non-governmental participants have something more to offer than voting once a year–namely, good information. In much the same way that we devise legal procedures to ensure fairness in the courtroom or open deliberation in Congress, we can design technology–and the legal and policy framework to support it–that elicits specific, structured, and manageable input, not from individuals, but from collaborative groups. If we can harness the enthusiasm and knowledge of "netizens" to the legal and political processes generally reserved for citizens, we can produce government decision-making that is both more expert and, at the same time, more democratic.

The Problem with Experts

In his award-winning book On Political Judgment, social psychologist Philip Tetlock analyzed the predictions of those professionals who advise government about political and economic trends. Pitting these professional pundits against minimalist performance benchmarks, he found "few signs that expertise translates into greater ability to make either ‘well-calibrated’ or ‘discriminating’ forecasts." It turns out that professional status has much less bearing on the quality of information than we might assume, and that professionals–whether in politics or other domains–are notoriously unsuccessful at making informed predictions.

Moreover, the traditional reliance on institutionalized expertise is fraught with political controversy. Sometimes these pre-selected scientists and outside experts are simply lobbyists passing by another name. The current administration, for example, regularly replaces experts on agency advisory panels with ideologues and political allies. In a published statement titled Restoring Scientific Integrity in Policy Making, over 60 preeminent scientists, including Nobel laureates and National Medal of Science recipients, lambasted the Bush Administration for "manipulation of the process through which science enters into its decisions." But if Bush is among the more egregious violators of the presumed wall between politics and institutionalized expertise, his actions only go to show how easy it is for any executive to abuse his or her power of appointment to disrupt experts’ advisory function.

The problem of relying only on professionals in our bureaucracy has been compounded by institutionalized practices of confidential decision-making, even in areas where public input could have a decisive impact, such as the review of patent applications. Whereas a first- or second-year civil servant at another agency might be drafting memos, a patent examiner with limited supervision is doling out a patent that could impact the fate of an industry or fundamental scientific research. Yet, until 1999, the USPTO, in order to protect the confidential trade secrets of inventors, did not publish applications. Even today, most (but not all) applications are only published after 18 months, and even then the examiner cannot communicate with the public. The USPTO allows third parties to submit publications with no commentary, annotations, or markings, and only for a fee, effectively eliminating participation by all but the most die-hard corporate competitors. As a result, despite a backlog of 700,000 applications last year (by now it is 800,000 and counting), the USPTO received only 40–100 such submissions, none of which were necessarily used in decision-making.

But if excessive reliance on governmental or selected professionals is the problem, direct public participation, as we have typically known it, is no panacea. Public participation in regulatory decision-making has been a part of the federal landscape since the end of World War II, when it was enshrined as a right in the Administrative Procedure Act of 1946. This may sound good in the abstract, but there is such a thing as too much public participation. Whereas democracy is to be practiced at the polling booth, bureaucrats are not supposed to feel the pressures of direct democratic involvement. It can corrupt the rationality of the process with the distortions of private interests. And more participation does not mean better participation. How should administrators deal with individuals who carp but offer little useful information to improve decision-making? Or interest groups that electronically submit tens of thousands of identical "postcard comments"?

Scientific peer review provides an alternative mechanism for oversight and quality control. The practice is widespread in government grant-making: The National Science Foundation relies on a network of more than 50,000 reviewers, while the National Institutes of Health relies on outside review groups and advisory councils from the scientific community to review over 70 percent of its grant applications. And the Environmental Protection Agency’s grant-selection process relies heavily on "science review panels," peer review groups chosen and managed by an outside scientist.