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Imbyism?

Sep 2nd, 2010
by Paul Evans.
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Here’s Rory Sutherland on the Spectator blog:

“….here lies the central challenge of the ‘Big Society’. In Britain our spectacular capacity for collective action in opposing things (Nazism, new housing, nightclubs) is matched only by our inability to harness any will or consensus when it comes to doing something new. Worse, our resistance to change is often self-defeating, since the only people not defeated by the bureaucratic hurdles are huge organisations like Tesco — while those traditional smaller cafés and shops that traditionalists claim to love cannot summon the energy to clear them.”

He continues by promoting a smart ‘planning permission in return for something’ proposal that I’m sure I’ve seen before somewhere (when you think about it, it’s a locally hypothecated variation on Land Value Tax, isn’t it?), but nevertheless, it’s a good one.

Posted in: Local government, Locality, Political innovation.
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Political Innovation No1: Towards Interactive Government

Sep 1st, 2010
by admin.
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This is a guest cross-post by Tim Davies – originally posted on the Political Innovation site here:

The communication revolution that we’ve undergone in recent years has two big impacts:

  • It changes what’s possible. It makes creating networks between people across organisations easier; it opens new ways for communication between citizens and state; it gives everyone who wants it a platform for global communication; and it makes it possible to discover local online dialogue.
  • It changes citizen expectations of government. When I can follow news from my neighbour’s blog on my phone, why can’t I get updates on local services on the mobile-web? When I can e-mail someone across the world and be collaborating on a document in minutes, why is it so hard to have a conversation with the council down the road? And when brands and mainstream media are doing interactivity and engagement – why are government departments struggling with it so much?

Right now, government is missing out on significant cost saving and service-enhancing benefits from new forms of communication and collaboration. But the answers are not simply about introducing new technology – they are to be found in intentional culture change: in creating the will and the opportunity for interactive government.

There are three things we need to focus on:

  • Culture change. Although there are pockets of interactivity breaking out across the public sector, it’s often counter-cultural and ‘underground’. Most staff feel constrained to work with tools given to them by IT departments, and to focus on official lines more than open conversations. Creating a culture of interactivity needs leadership from the top, and values that everyone can sign up to.
  • Removing the barriers. There are literally hundreds of small daily frustrations and barriers that can get in the way of interactive government. It might be the inability of upload a photo to an online forum (interactive government has human faces…), or consent and moderation policies that cover everyone’s backs but don’t allow real voices to be heard. Instead of ignoring these barriers, we need to overcome them – to rethink them within an interactive culture that can make dialogue and change a top priority.
  • Solving tough problems. Public service is tough: it has to deal with political, democratic and social pressures that would make most social media start-ups struggle. We need to think hard about how interactive technology and interactive ways of working play out in the tough cases that the public sector deals in every day.

The Interactive Charter is a project to explore how exactly we go about making government into interactive government. It’s got three parts:

  • Creating a pledge – The ‘Interactive Charter’ will be a clear statement that any organization (or senior manager within an organization) can sign up to say something along the lines of “I want my organization to get interactivity; and I’ll commit to overcoming the barriers to interactive ways of working”. With a promise and commitment from the top removing the barriers should get a lot easierOf course to just hand down a pledge wouldn’t be very interactive, so we’re drafting it on Mixed Ink.
  • Naming the problems…and overcoming them – We’ve already made a start over on the Interactive Charter wiki, but we would love you to join in suggesting practical challenges, and practical solutions, to interactive and digital working in government.
  • Putting it into practice – We want to pilot the approach: getting top-level support, and removing the barriers to interactivity from the ground up. Could your organization be part of that?

So, if you’ve got a vision for more interactive government, you can share it by redrafting the current pledge. And if you’ve faced or solved problems around interactive government, help shape the body of knowledge around each of the barriers and their solutions on the wiki. Of course, you could also just drop in comments over on the Political Innovation blog…

About Political Innovation

We’d be very interested to hear any ideas that you have for an essay of your own – we’ll need an email and we’ll want to discuss it with you before it goes on the site. All contributions will be archived on www.politicalinnovation.org – along with details of what we’re looking for from essayists and a bunch of FAQs and a guide to how we hope the whole thing will play out.

I hope you’ll get involved in this as a commenter, participant or maybe even as an essayist. Make sure you don’t miss anything by joining our Google Group, subscribing to the blog RSS feed, getting each post emailed to you and, of course, following us on Twitter andFacebook.

Posted in: Deliberative democracy, Democratic renewal, Political innovation, The internet, Web 2.0 and democracy.
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Launching the ‘Political Innovation’ project

Aug 31st, 2010
by Paul Evans.
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When bloggers meet, I often find that old allegiances (be they left right, or Unionist/Republican often dissolve into a different political spilt. Those of us who imagine that we ‘get’ the read-write web against the political colleagues that we have who, we believe, fail to foresee the possibilities or the threats.

I’ve occasionally witnessed left-right-and-centrist bloggers in (non) violent agreement with each other – not about political direction, but about what is possible in harnessing the power of the web. About how a more effective participative political culture can bring about a range of subtle changes – to reverse the broken politico/media relationship out of some of the cul-de-sacs that it appears to have stuck in.

Today, a few of us have come together to launch a project called ‘Political Innovation’. It’s for anyone who has ever asked themselves ‘why is politics still done like this?’

We’ve put a call out through our personal networks for initial contributions and we’ve already had promises of more than ten essays suggesting serious political innovations that are based upon an understanding of what interactive social media and the web can achieve. Continue reading →

Posted in: Media and communications, Political innovation.
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Digging out the old stuff from the archive:
Getting the politics right for reform

Jun 12th, 2009
by Anthony Zacharzewski.
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Matthew Taylor, former No 10 policy wonk, has an interesting article on his blog about public service reform. He rightly says that finances over the next few years are both a huge challenge to public services, but also an opportunity to make real change happen. That won’t come about, he says, without a change in the national political culture, starting from the top:

There are far too many ministers, all of whom think it is their job to generate initiatives; ideas are allowed to be developed and launched without any reference to those at the front line; change management and the time it takes is not treated seriously; there is complete lack of realism about how far the centre’s intended messages actually reach; civil servants fail to see or warn (or be allowed to warn) their masters that every new target or piece of guidance had an adverse impact on all these existing targets and instructions (not to mention local morale).

No disrespect to Matthew, but this is a very technocratic argument. The idea that there should be fewer ministers is perhaps not a bad one – though it needs to happen alongside a more powerful and independent Commons and a reformed Lords. No matter how many Ministers there are, however, they will still be put on a spot on the Today programme and asked to make a commitment that “[bad thing] will never be allowed to happen again.”

There are certainly real opportunities for reform in the fiscal squeeze that’s ahead. The barrier to transformation, though, is not hyperactive Ministers who don’t let technocrats manage, it’s an immature political dialogue in which the media and the public create and feed off outrage and disgust, while politicians sit on top of the bureaucracy and try to placate the beast.

This is a local government problem as much as a national government one. Anyone who has seen parents protesting about school places or attended a controversial meeting of the planning committee will understand that.

If the spending cuts to come are not to create more disaffection and anger, they can’t be done behind closed doors. They need to be discussed openly, in public, and real choices have to be set out clearly, not decided and then ‘consulted upon’.

People should have the chance to see the books, and have intermediaries more trusted than journalists to explain to them what the choices are. They then need to be able to express an opinion more nuanced than ‘I want everything for free’.

Creating the circumstances in which this can happen is part of a widening and deepening of active citizenship that is essential if the political world is to catch up with what today’s citizens expect.

I’m not so naive as to think that this level of openness will appear in the twelve months before a general election, although it would be nice to think that it could. Afterwards, though, if Labour or the Conservatives are really serious about localism and democratic reform, a big conversation, not a Big Conversation, needs to be created.

Posted in: Council services, Decision making, Deliberative democracy, Political innovation, Public administration, The media.

The penny drops at last!

Aug 28th, 2010
by Paul Evans.
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It may have happened fifteen years later than it needed to, but at the annual MacTaggart Lecture at the Edinburgh International Television Festival, BBC Director General Mark Thompson – and, presumably, his colleagues in the corporation have finally woken up to the real threat that the corporation faces: the downward pressure that is being placed upon the producers of TV content.

Click for pic credit

That BSkyB have been allowed a free pass to make a fortune without giving anything back apart from cash for their allocation of spectrum (like so many other corporations, they’ve been allowed to get away with being socially useless) – and in doing so, they’ve created in impossible ecology for content-producing broadcasters to compete in. It’s a race to the bottom. Understand this and you’re halfway there to understanding how Sky’s marketing budget is bigger than ITV’s production funds.

Thompson is onto a winning argument here: The argument that we need to continue to produce locally-oriented content in the UK – and that there’s an overwhelming democratic case for doing so.

It’s been an issue that was addressed at EU level in the mid-1990s, and British regulators and media commentators appeared to spend the intervening decade-and-a-half either pretending that the regulations didn’t exist or that they weren’t needed (with honourable exceptions such as the former MEP Carole Tongue)*. Continue reading →

Posted in: Conversational localities, Media and communications, The media.
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Informed public = better democracy?

Aug 27th, 2010
by Paul Evans.
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As Churchill* once said: “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?”

The tool of a Kenyan plot to take over the US Government

This article in The Boston Globe makes the argument that democracy is actually damaged by the way that people respond to being contradicted by evidence (they dig in rather than adapt to it). It uses this satirical post from The Onion to make the point that the virtue of open-mindedness isn’t a universal one;

Spurred by an administration he believes to be guilty of numerous transgressions, self-described American patriot Kyle Mortensen, 47, is a vehement defender of ideas he seems to think are enshrined in the U.S. Constitution and principles that brave men have fought and died for solely in his head.

Kyle Mortensen would gladly give his life to protect what he says is the Constitution’s very clear stance against birth control.

“Our very way of life is under siege,” said Mortensen, whose understanding of the Constitution derives not from a close reading of the document but from talk-show pundits, books by television personalities, and the limitless expanse of his own colorful imagination. “It’s time for true Americans to stand up and protect the values that make us who we are.” Continue reading →

Posted in: Conversational localities, Democratic renewal, Media and communications.
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Political innovation

Aug 3rd, 2010
by Paul Evans.
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Apologies for the light posting around here at the moment – I’ve been very busy with another blog-related project called ‘Political Innovation‘.

It’s really for anyone who has looked at politics and asked themselves “why do we still have to do it this way?” The founding premise is that interactive technology is a game-changer.

On the one hand, it has had a huge impact upon conventional politics and it has compounded many of its minor pre-existing felonies.

On the other, it creates all kinds of possibilities – ones that would be welcomed by people across the political divides – to change the way that democratic politics is done. Continue reading →

Posted in: Political innovation, Web 2.0 and democracy.

Frank exchange is better than pussyfooting

Aug 2nd, 2010
by Paul Evans.
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The Political Innovation project I’m currently working on (more soon!) is going to be very focussed upon the political aspects of interactivity – with the premise that more, freer, better exchanges of evidence and opinion are a public good – and that not enough is being done politically to facilitate these.

Via Norm, who offers a good summary – here’s Michael Sandel on ‘The Lost Art of Democratic Debate’, making the case against pussyfooting around difficult moral issues. Do watch it all if you can – it runs to 20 minutes, so maybe put the kettle on first?

Posted in: Conversational localities.
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Public service media as an asset to democracy: Where next?

Jul 26th, 2010
by Paul Evans.
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The BBC – in it’s current incarnation – sees itself as an asset to liberal democracy in a variety of ways.

Channel 4's 4iP project

Are 4iP working to re-articulate what public service media is for?

I do to – and given our many failings as a democracy (our centralisation, our unelected second-chamber, our politically independent civil service, the huge unchecked power of pressure groups and media-owners, etc), the BBC acts as a hugely important counterbalance.

My own hasty list of ways that it currently does this would include the following:

  • Providing a balanced alternative to the biases of commercial media in news reporting and current affairs (acknowledging right-wing suspicions of metropolitan liberal bias here…)
  • Acting as a British expression of the Cultural Exception (updated to a more politically fashionable role as the guardians of cultural diversity) and providing other counterbalances to market failure within the media – creating a shelter from the monopolistic content-production ecology that is dominated by US producers, etc
  • Giving us an alternative to the bloody awful tedium of ad-driven TV (both the distortions to the schedules and the actual ads themselves) and providing a hugely efficient provider of value-for-money at the same time in return for the minor loss-of-liberty that arises out of a near-tax imposition
  • Providing a counterbalance to the increasing fragmentation of the media to provide a shared national platform that can promote a sense of citizenship

Personally, I’ve bought most of these arguments for most of my adult life. Increasingly, though, the first one is starting to look like an impoverished objective for a variety of reasons.

Firstly, there’s the question of how far pluralism is preferable to neutrality. I’d make this case in more detail, but Mick did so a while ago on Slugger O’Toole.

Secondly, there’s the question of how far the relationship between political structures and the media is a single adversarial one. Sure, there’s a role for the media in holding the political establishment to account. But there is also the task of the ‘candid friend’ – helping innovators know what will work, broadening the adversarial fire away from just the elected political establishment and focussing some of it on its unelected rivals.

The media is extremely good at bringing the low-hanging fruit to the attention of the political class. A quick perusal of the spaces in which the public are invited to sound off shows that it is very easy to get at the public minorities (trans: The Silent Majority) who know exactly what they think and are passionate about their beliefs. But the tougher – but more important – task is how you can tap into the sentiments of the larger body of people with mild preferences. Twitter’s business model appears to be based upon the creation of a space where a wide range of easy sentiment is exhibited – and then monetising that data in one way or another by selling it to search engines.

Is there a role for a public service media in creating quick light conversations on a wide range of issues and then mining them – using sentiment analysis or – much less cleverly – simply flushing out routine conversations expressly for the purpose of listening to them? Getting conversations going is something that Mick at Slugger or Hugh at Harringay Online are very good at (but few others are quite as adept…)

Is this something that a public service broadcaster could do? Is it something that a commercial media organisation could ever be trusted to do? My preference is with the public service broadcaster.

Taking this one step further (and I apologise now for linking to more of my own posts) is it perhaps the role of public service media to destroy the monopoly that public sector communications staff have in describing their own services?

Is it possible that the future role for public service media is to be a trusted intermediary – a detached and independent ears and mouth that helps the state? Is this what the final destination of 4iP projects such as MyPolice and HelpMeInvestigate (among others) could be?

Posted in: Conversational localities, Deliberative democracy, Distributed moral wisdom, Web 2.0 and democracy.
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Crowdsourcing policy? Politicians do this better than apps

Jul 2nd, 2010
by Paul Evans.
3 comments

The new team at HMG have created the Your Freedom site – a tool that is designed to crowdsource policy proposals – specifically requests to repeal unnecessary legislation, regulation or restrictions upon personal liberties.

It follows hot on the heels of the Treasury’s ‘Spending Challenge‘ – a site designed to ask people who work in the public sector for ideas on how they can curb costs. It is a fairly standard site developed originally – as it happens – by my mate Simon (who deserved more credit than he got for it), built to invite ideas but not to publish them unmoderated.

The treasury site’s findings will prove to be a slow burn, but as far as I can see, the idea of saying ‘OK, you work here, what could we do better’ has to have an appeal that goes beyond the small-state fixations of the governing coalition. No-one who is critical of British management standards can fail to see that there must be some benefit in asking the  workers what they would do better.

As my friend Big Pete put it in the context of postal workers a while ago…. Continue reading →

Posted in: Being a politician, Conservatives, Consultations, Deliberative democracy, Lib-Dems, Web 2.0 and democracy.
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Coalitions and representative democracy

Jun 24th, 2010
by Paul Evans.
1 comment

Not being a supporter of either of the coalition parties, the current range of opportunities to accuse them of betraying their manifesto commitments are very tempting. It’s hard not to relish a few years of Nick Clegg having this video replayed constantly in the light of Tuesday’s budget VAT hike.

But taking the partisan hat off, the upsides for the quality of democracy are hard to avoid as well. I’d broadly agree with Lib-Dem blogger Mark Thompson in this ‘campaign in majoritarian, govern in coalition’ post that the experience of participating in – or watching – coalition government will bring a number of improvements to the way that political discourse is conducted in the UK. If it results in more equivocal value-based electioneering, it can only be a good thing. Continue reading →

Posted in: Conservatives, Elections, Labour, Lib-Dems.
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