Wonderful pop-up social enterprise thinktank Popse (possibly the first pop-up thinktank ever, but certainly not the last) popped up in London’s Exmouth Market from 9-13 May.

Among other hot topics was a proposal from the Waterways Project that a community ‘right to manage’ (or a ‘presumption in favour of community management’) should join the existing proposals in the Localism Bill.I’m pasting below some ruminations which I initially posted to the Popse website. More importantly, for reflections from the Popse team themselves, head over to this post.

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The social enterprise space is where you currently find some of the most interesting conversations about democracy; its quality; our aspirations for it here in the UK.

Tuesday evening’s drop-in session provided an opportunity for one such conversation when we mulled over proposals for a ‘community right to manage’ and the prospects for mutuals.

Each of the three community rights-based proposals that are currently out there in the Localism Bill brings real potential to stimulate more vibrant spaces for democratic, participatory engagement.

They all raise concerns, though; because they promise, in essence to leave it to ‘the market of community’ (aka the Big Society) to handle some of the most significant risks.

To put it bluntly, the reality of ‘community’ across the UK doesn’t come with a ready-made cookie-cutter commitment to sustainable development, nor consistently high levels of belief in the value of participation or free association among equals. That commitment is something that has to be discussed, nurtured, debated, traded, and advanced.

The risk is that stripping away much of the current policy framework for and local level technical expertise on sustainable development leaves little institutional infrastructure for managing trade-offs or competition between adjoining communities; or even within groups in the same community. Local level traffic calming and parking campaigns, for example, are often a case in point.

All these issues aside, (and they’re points for discussion, not show-stopper objections) The Waterways Project’s proposal for a ‘community right to manage’ deserves our serious attention.

For one thing, community groups wouldn’t need to raise sufficient funds to exercise a ‘right to buy’ if they were only looking to exercise a ‘right to manage’. For another, they might be able to benefit from the skills and knowledge transfer potential of asset owners with oversight of lots of community managed assets – so long as those owners themselves were operating within a framework that allowed them to benefit from cooperation with ‘managing’ groups.

There are lots more things that need thinking through, of course, in the ‘right to manage’ proposal. In common with the ‘right to bid’, there may be restrictions in any requirement for a community group to have been accepted for registration as a Charity (the list of charitable purposes can be quite restrictive, for example; and I suspect the last thing the Charity Commission currently wants to have to deal with is tens of thousands of new micro-charity registrations resulting directly from the Localism Bill).

There are some fairly dull issues that would need to be tackled to do with risk and liability (think Japanese knot-weed and other invasive alien species for example; let alone breaches in river or canal banks). And with many of our waterways under-utilised, the idea of ‘canal-side’ or ‘bank-side’ community doesn’t necessarily translate into geographical spaces (6 or even 20-mile long strips) that make sense for the assets likely to be available.

A community right to manage in relation to our waterside assets (and waterways) would likely call for at least a wee bit of community engineering. But if environmental assets such as canals, for example, were more intensively used for transport or recreation, we might find that their associated senses of ‘community’ also stretched out.

The trick would be to find a way to ensure that the whole exercise of community management was fun; more about the participation than the risk management; and more about shared space and cooperation than competition for scarce resources and assets.

Links: http://www.popse.org.uk
http://www.waterways-civa.org.uk
http://www.fdsd.org

My friend Mick Phythian picked up a very useful motto/warning for anyone promoting e-government projects a while ago. To government, your time is worth £Zero – and this is why e-government fails.

A good democracy has to value everyone's time properly (click for pic credit)

This explains why a very sharp idea that Dave Briggs has been working on recently – promoting the notion of ‘Microparticipation’ with a dedicated idea-site here – is so important.

We are, after all, being gently forced to comply with other people’s procedures where it is in their interest to invest in this compulsion (or ‘nudging’ as it is gently put).

This is the whole trajectory of the World Wide Web – from the first release of HTML scripts and early browsers in the early 1990s, through the progressive development of website coding and site-building tools, the burgeoning science of Accessibility, Usability and the ‘Semantic Web’ through to the aggressive mainstreaming that it has undergone in recent years as social media has dragged billions of people into compliance with the web. Social media is a conspiracy to dovetail all of our economic activity with the processes of the organisations that invest in online applications.

By ‘compliance’ I don’t just mean the ‘compliant code’ beloved of good web-designers. I mean our social compliance. We go to our local bank or town hall less often these days – we often go to their website, comply with their security procedures and fill out forms that are convenient for them – as suppliers – so that they can reduce ‘avoidable contact’ and thereby be more efficient.

In theory, this benefits shareholders and ratepayers respectively. But I’m waiting for a conspiracy theorist to start kicking up about this. One could take the view that this quote from the 19th Century Anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon could apply equally to our relationship with corporations today:

“To be governed is to be watched, inspected, spied upon, directed, law-driven, numbered, regulated, enrolled, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, checked, estimated, valued, censured, commanded, by creatures who have neither the right nor the wisdom nor the virtue to do so.

To be governed is to be at every operation, at every transaction noted, registered, counted, taxed, stamped, measured, numbered, assessed, licensed, authorized, admonished, prevented, forbidden, reformed, corrected, punished.

It is, under pretext of public utility, and in the name of the general interest, to be placed under contribution, drilled, fleeced, exploited, monopolized, extorted from, squeezed, hoaxed, robbed; then, at the slightest resistance, the first word of complaint, to be repressed, fined, vilified, harassed, hunted down, abused, clubbed, disarmed, bound, choked, imprisoned, judged, condemned, shot, deported, sacrificed, sold, betrayed; and to crown all, mocked, ridiculed, derided, outraged, dishonoured.

That is government; that is it’s justice; that is it’s morality.”

OK. That’s all probably a bit OTT. But where it matters, the business logic behind usability is very strong. Make it easy and attractive for people to comply and they are more likely to do so.

But in a democracy, this is a double-edged sword. If an organisation or government ask us for our opinion, or evidence, without it being a low-cost exercise for us, they will get hugely unrepresentative responses. They will get responses from…

• the time rich
• commercial lobbies
• individuals with a vested interest in a particular issue (this can be financial, cultural, ideological or faith-based, for example)

Of course democracies can’t afford to pay the public all of the time (though the use of commercial polling firms and focus groups are a well-established way of consulting the public). Increasingly, we are going to be asked to participate in government.

It is for this reason that it is vital that quick light responses are sought. That people seeking feedback are prepared to invest in ways of going to where the public already are and making it quick and easy to comply with their requests.

Last week, I posted a list of attributes that a good democracy could have – attributes that I beleive would be accepted accross the political spectrum – and ones that most liberal democracies could do a lot better on. Of my original 17 points, eight would be directly served if Microparticipation were to become a mainstream idea (no17 in particular). They are…..

1)      Wider participation in policy formation is a good thing – it increases the public stake in collective decision-making

2)      A more diverse polity reflecting a greater panorama of perspectives can only improve democracy

3)      Decision making should not be dominated by people who have more time or wealth than others

6)      People with a vested interest in particular outcomes should never have the capacity to crowd out people with mild preferences

7)      For deliberation to work, doubt and equivocation must be encouraged – and not crowded out by ‘conviction’

10)   Interest groups are good at achieving their aims at the expense of everybody else. These powers must be counterbalanced

11)   Media owners should have no more influence on policymaking than anyone else. Their abuse of this power should be challenged

17) Broad participation requires investment. Those asking questions have a duty to make it very easy and attractive to answer

There is one other factor here: Democratic deliberation is better when people who are uncertain, disinterested and equivocal can dominate the conversation. I’ve argued it a number of times here before [example]. My own most oft-repeated quote at the moment is from Darwin: “Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.” – and my favourite Wikipedia link is to this page about the Dunning-Kruger effect. (Shorter version: certainty is a bad thing!)

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….

“Most of the people who work on the front line are not obstacles, they are experts. Their knowledge is far more valuable than the snake oil of management theory. The denigration of the workforce and the elevation of the great talents who brought us the credit crunch into superheroes is one of the more unlikely episodes in a class war, one being waged, increasingly successfully, against workers, rather than by them.”

Your Freedom is a different matter. It uses a standard tool -the Dialogue App – developed by those good people at Delib.

Firstly, a bit of disclosure: I’ve found the meme that we have, somehow, been stripped of our liberties to be very problematic and I said why here a while ago. I’d go further. I suspect that the Conservatives will soon tire of it once their feet are fully under the table in the same way that they tired of the notion that we were an elective dictatorship at some point between Lord Hailsham’s pronouncement on the subject in the late 1970s (under a Labour government) and Mrs Thatcher’s massively-centralising rate-capping reforms of the 1980s.

All of that said, how have they done, and what could they have done better? Well Chris Applegate rather lays the boot in here, effectively endorsing the treasury’s approach rather than the ‘Your Freedom‘ one. Some of his suggestions raise way too high a bar:

“If you want people to propose changes to laws, then make the users think about those laws when submitting. There should be a mandatory field asking them to specify which acts or regulations they would want to change – e.g. “Terrorism Act 2000?.”

Surely the point of doing this is to circumvent the way that well-heeled pressure groups dominate public discourse? You’d need a team of savvy researchers to be able to meet that bar.

On the other hand, Chris also offers a load of good practical suggestions for weeding out the Clarksonism and his ideas on moderation and de-duplication are good ones. But I think that the real problem here is that it is the bolting-on of interactive tools to a government that isn’t fundamentally interactive in the first place. This isn’t a particular criticism of the Lib-Servatives either – Labour were significantly worse at this than the new crowd.

However, it has to be said that the government are trying – they’re doing something innovative that they will learn from – and that can only be a good thing. When I first saw the site, I used Twitter to float the idea that it would be better to create a tool that promoted collaborative authoring,  allowing a large-ish number of people to collectively describe the problem rather than to propose solutions. Replies suggested that this was too high a bar. They’re right, of course. I can’t point to many successful examples of people using collaborative authoring tools to describe a problem.

But there are some, and they show what is needed to succeed.

MixedInk has had a number of successes crowdsourcing a single description of something. They used weight of numbers plus fanaticism (in different cases) to get a good single document out of a lot of people – one where strong points were promoted and weak ones were exorcised. I like this idea because it is a good use of active citizens – it makes them the servants – rather than the masters – of elected politicians.

If a government minister were to find the right way to introduce a narrow-ish subject, I’m confident that a useable outcome would result.

Similarly, Debategraph has made a start doing similar things, but it is still in need of development in terms of usability. On the one hand, MixedInk, Debategraph and the various wiki tools (including MediaWiki – the tool behind Wikipedia) are no-where near as usable and accessible as Delib’s tool, and any politician who were to put all of their chips on following my advice – ‘crowdsource a description of the problem using collaborative authoring tool’ – they’d probably not last the week out.

But – on the other hand – if the government were prepared to invest a portion of that £1m that it offered for a public-policy website on usability specialists that would make collaborative authoring more attractive – perhaps it would be make enough of a difference. It may even be enough to simply signal that ‘a crowdsourced description of problems’ is their preferred means of consultation – perhaps that sort of clarity would unlock the necessary investment?

One of the best examples I’ve seen was the one introduced in advance of The Interactive Charter last year by Tim Davies. He managed to crowdsource the ‘50 barriers‘ wiki. Tim is a savvy guy who knows how to use participative tools.

As an individual, Tim knows how to do it and has developed the a range of personal skills that he needs. There are lots of ways of weeding out useless commentary, but the bottom line is that the best application for doing it isn’t any kind of script: It is, instead, a carbon-based lifeform – one that has been elected and has the executive power to take high-quality input from the public and do something useful with it.

At the end of the day, there is no substitute for getting actual politicians to develop interactive skills and do this themselves. So many initiatives will only back-fill until the time that this is accepted.

Apologies for the very light posting here in recent weeks. When you blog about politics and elections a lot, you probably have the excuse that you are doing rather than blogging during elections, and this is true of some of our contributors. In my case, a tide of work that was only indirectly related to the election hit me about five weeks ago and I’ve been drowning in it ever since.

We have a plan to crank up the volume here, and you’ll hear more about it shortly. But filling our recent silence has been an unprecedented volume of quite excellent blogging on the subject of the election and the constitutional issues that arose from the inconclusive (by UK standards) election result. The 2010 Election Blog has been very good, and I hope the continue it – if they’re looking for a longer-term home for it, modesty forbids me from mentioning the perfect blog for them to do this on.

On the longer finger, Peter Levine has offered this collection of posts that I’m linking to in the right order with his subheadings.

• Creating informed communities (part one)
  • Strategy 1: A Civic Information Corps: Using the nation’s “service” infrastructure to generate knowledge
• Creating informed communities (part two)
  • Strategy 2: Universities as Community Information Hubs
• Creating informed communities (part three)
  • Strategy 3: Invest in Face-to-Face Public Deliberation
• Creating informed communities (part four)
  • Strategy 4: Generate Public “Relational” Knowledge
• Creating informed communities (part five)
  • Strategy 5: Organize People to Defend the Knowledge Commons

Stay tuned. We’ll be back to our usual posting-rate shortly.

The Tories have launched their manifesto today with a lot of the material from their 2009 Shift Control document [pdf] making the final cut.

It may be worth pointing to Anthony’s detailed crit of this document (below) as a good deal of it is relevant today.

• Shift Delete
• Command backspace
• SysRq F12
• Home PgDn
• Escape End

I’m looking forward to reading a few crits of what has made the final cut, but in the meantime, here’s a purely personal observation on this:

I’m no Tory myself, and it would be unfair of me to present myself as any kind of neutral on this question, but the Tories’ plans for local government are easily the most worrying aspect of their policy development in recent years. Sir Jeremy Beecham highlighted the threat that this has presented to representative democracy at the time:

The truth is that the effect of these proposals would be to undercut representative local democracy and diminish the appeal of service as a local councillor.

For me, one of the biggest local policy foul-ups has been the implementation of choice in local schools – where pushy-parents can game the system to ensure that their kids end up in schools that are more socially exclusive than the old Grammar Schools. As far as I can see, so many of aspects of public policy today seem to be about finding ways of getting people who could be paying tax into a position where they aren’t – and where they are the key beneficiaries of those who do pay it.

Is every aspect of local public spending going to be gamed in this way? I think that this is what the Tories have in mind, and we should be worried about that.

I was out-and-about the other day and came across this advert:

My local authority want me to have my say in how they spend and collect their money. When I got home, I visited the www.barnet.gov.uk/budget site accordingly.

It was quite good. It  went some way towards explaining how the council is funded and what it spends its money on. There are some big headline graphs that show “Barnet Council’s back office costs are amongst the lowest in London” and “Barnet receives substantially less financial support from central Government than the London average.”

It also has a budget simulator using Delib‘s platform. For some reason, it only offers us the option to see the impact of budget reductions in specific policy areas (I’d like to see options to increase some of the spends). For the sake of completeness, there’s a detailed document that shows the figures tabulated, and if anyone had the time and energy, they could go through the figures and raise questions about particular elements.

But Barnet deserve credit for having also taken the figures and poured them into a good info-graphic (by the way, I’m including these images just in case they are taken down when the consultation ends).

All-in-all though – leaving the graphic aside, I couldn’t help feeling that the whole thing was being framed to suit a desired outcome. I’m sure that there are comparison charts where Barnet’s performance is closer to the mediocre than the outstanding.

Now Barnet are something of a controversial local authority. They fell out with Ken Livingstone when they removed a lot of traffic calming measures a few years ago. As the Association of British Drivers put it, “Barnet is on the front line against Ken Livingstone and TfL’s anti-car policies by adopting common sense policies on transport.” They also have a hawkish approach to social care and the EasyCouncil model are not without its critics.

I’m not here to go over these issues, but it’s worth looking at some of the more bog-standard questions that I think a lot of councils would benefit from answering. My biggest problem with the way Barnet are doing this (and I should be clear, I’m picking on Barnet because I live there – you could do a similar exercise with any council, and you may find that Barnet have gone further than most in even bothering to ask) is that there seems to be a political and managerial monopoly on the framing of the consultation.

Surely the opposition groups could have been provided with comparable resources to describe the situation differently and frame the options to suit their agendas?

Or even better, they could have adopted the following workflow:

1. Follow The Conservative Party’s lead in using Google Moderator to crowdsource a set of questions from the public. Get dozens of people to ask questions (invite texts and tweets – they don’t need to all be from local residents!) and try to drive thousands of people to bid those questions up or down. Texts are crucial here – any local lists that can be used, and any way of incentivising people to do so – perhaps even a small prize for the selected questions?
2. Then commit to getting an independent body (not selected by the council) to answer those questions on the council’s behalf. Invite all councillors to provide their own commentaries on the answers if they wish.
3. Provide the raw data and offer a cash prize (say £3k?) to anyone who can take that data and use it to help visualise what the key decisions are most effectively. Invite a group of local residents to award that prize to the people who help improve their understanding and clarify the issues the best
4. Only then, present your options to the public – and get indicative results by reaching out over the heads of the hard-to-avoids to the hard-to-reach local residents – I have a suggestion of how this could be done here.

None of this is likely to prove too attractive to councils for two reasons.

Firstly, it takes a lot of power out of the hands of unelected officials – the monopoly on describing problems was always a key weapon in Sir Humphrey’s armoury. Secondly, Barnet’s Tories would only have been human if they’d framed the questions that they wanted answered. Most ruling local groups will do this. But they did so, and it’s a bit naughty, isn’t it?

However, I’d suggest that councils may be pleasantly surprised if they did it my way. The biggest thing missing from Barnet’s current consultation model is that there is very little space for the public to tell everyone something that they didn’t already know about Barnet’s policy options.

Nick at Podnosh has a very interesting post up here – one that ties in with the ‘eavesdropping‘ theme that I’ve been trailing here a while ago:

Listening in: Not always sinister

“…listening with a purpose is exactly what [public sector bodies] should be doing, otherwise they would be wasting public money. It doesn’t follow that this will be a malign purpose.  Listening to the social web can help  the police improve the way they spend public money rather than waste it.”

It does kinda beg the question of what elected representatives are for though. Sure – public sector bodies should be keeping an eye on what people are saying about them – but really, this is the role of the elected representative. Because politicians aren’t stepping up to this particular mark, public authorities put themselves in this place.

Will this continue to be the case? Do politicians understand the options that the social web opens up for them? I’d say that they don’t at the moment, but like everyone else, lots of pennies are dropping for them.

We’ll see….

(Apologies – I’ve just realised that the link to Nick’s site was dropped in my editing process. Dunno how that happened – and fixed now!)

Via Spartakan, I’ve just seen this outline of how local debate could be / is structured. And, initially, it looks fairly complete as long is it is covering only debate, as opposed to policy-making.

I think it’s a useful diagram, and I don’t have the time to do this properly – graphic design is a non-trivial activity – but if the quality or the inclusiveness of that debate is an issue, there are a few important things that need adding:

• Beyond the parochial: Is there any data or information on how the issue in question is addressed elsewhere? Case studies? Experiences? Data that can be adapted to project possible outcomes if approaches that have been tried elsewhere were applied here? And how is this presented in a way that makes it accessible?
• Where is ‘everybody’? What about the people who aren’t active ‘community members’? And what about people who don’t join community groups? Some people don’t feel strongly about particular issues so they don’t join groups. Or maybe they work long hours or have competing responsibilities. Either way, they don’t turn up. But their views, experiences and opinions are equally valuable – or, as I would argue, more valuable than those of the people who do take an active interest. How effective are elected representatives at covering this question?
• Where is the intelligence? Once you become familiar with a complex question, it becomes clear that the debate about it is being conducted in what is almost a parallel universe. You may need to sit down before you read this and brace yourself for an unsettling revelation, but here it is: Newspapers don’t always employ intelligent reporters who dedicate their time to understanding the issues and representing them fairly. These people do, however, have the ability to dominate and shift the focus of that debate entirely.
• Where are the hidden hands? Where are the competing monopolies that are actually there, but not immediately visible? Think tanks publish reports and data all of the time. So do academics and civil servants in different forms. This work is usually paid for and commissioned by the ‘public officials’ in that diagram and in a diluted form, their work is paid into the process by those same public officials. In addition, political parties have a similar parallel influence.
• Opinion v Evidence: Opinion – as opposed to evidence – is involved here in a big way. How far is that opinion being regulated in order to ensure that diversity rather than weight is evident?
• Where is the manipulation? There are often pressure groups that have a vested interest in addressing these issues. They insert their data and messages into that process in a strategic way in order to distort it to their own ends. There is also the question of public representatives. How far are they helping to convene a discussion in the public interest, and how far are they there to promote either their own personal interests, the interests of an external organisation (a pressure group or a political sponsor perhaps?)
• What does e-democracy add to this? How far can we – the people with access to neutral public data, and the tools to interpret it – help or hinder this process? Can we introduce new information into the pot? Can we visualise and contextualise existing information so that those engaged in the debate can look at it in a new light?

Not a complete set of questions – and some a bit messy – but I think that it’s important that they’re asked.

I’ve been reading Cass Sunstein’s ‘Going to Extremes‘ lately – it’s worth a look.

Sunstein’s conclusion – that when we are filtered into like-minded groups that we reinforce each other’s prejudices and tend to reach more extreme conclusions than we would if we were on our own – is not a particularly startling one in itself.

What is interesting is Sunstein’s discussion of how that polarisation happens and what the consequences of it are. He’s also very good on the question of  how extremism isn’t always a bad thing.

More of that another time though. The reason I’m drawing attention to it is that I think Cass would be interested in this exercise that I kicked off yesterday – almost on a whim.

Slugger O’Toole is a site that I contribute to occasionally, as well as working with it’s founder on some offline projects. The site is largely devoted to issues in Northern Ireland’s politics, and Mick has often noted a phenomenon called ‘Whataboutery.’

It’s something of a conversation killer.  A recent example that I found was where someone from Sinn Féin outlined views on violence against women. One of the first comments that appeared under the blog-post discussing this was that Sinn Féin members had no place discussing violence against women – after all, hadn’t the IRA killed lots of women in it’s time?

As points go, it’s not irrelevant, but neither was it designed to take the conversation about domestic violence to a productive place. (A clever commenter replied that Protestants had no grounds to speak about violence against women either – after all, Henry VIII beheaded two of his wives!)

Therefore, the reason I thought it would be a good idea to use debategraph to map ‘Whataboutery’ is because all of that enthusiasm for presenting one narrow exclusive point of view could be used to create something that the rest of us can use. Use the ‘hive mind’ comprised of the users of a large-ish website to construct a working model of a complex problem.

It also illustrates, I think, how active citizenship can be harnessed for the greater good. In the past, I’ve argued that consultations are often objectively undemocratic because they massively over-represent the views of people who feel strongly on specific issues and / or have more time on their hands than the rest of us.

The self-styled classical liberal blogger Tim Worstall has coined ‘Worstall’s Law of Organizations: “All and any organizations will in the end be run by those who stay awake in committee …”

But active citizenship works – I would suggest – when these people – often time-rich fanatics – have to compete with each other for the privilege of representing us for a few years at a time. As this debategraph illustrates, they may also be useful recruits to a hive mind mapping exercise. Perhaps we can learn a lot by listening to their general buzz of fanatics and busybodies even if we’d prefer to ignore their individual voices?

Local government governance guru Peter Keith-Lucas has
an article in this week’s Local Government Lawyer assessing the current state of governance in local councils.

It’s a good read – expert but not too technical. Keith-Lucas has plagues to put on the houses of both parties: the Labour party for watering down the proper role of scrutiny in its most recent green paper, the Conservatives for setting out proposals on Standards Committee issues that (he suggests) leave the door open for greater councillor corruption. Here’s his closing paragraph (but do go and read the lot):

For healthy local government, there must be corporate governance, there must be a balance between the power of the executive and the checks and balances, in terms of council and scrutiny holding the executive to account, and an enforceable set of minimum standards of conduct. I am seriously concerned that the checks and balances which were an essential part of the 2000 Act Settlement are under attack. That promises a prosperous New Year for lawyers, but not a happy time for local government.