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.

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.

The thing is, all political parties are coalitions anyway. They’re clusters of smaller social interests that oppose the other clusters more than the rival components of their own. Our First Past the Post electoral system usually promotes coalitions within political parties rather than between them and any significant change to that system will probably result in a re-alignment of those components.

When election campaigns – and the conversation inbetweentimes becomes more of a pluralistic struggle about values, we’ll have something that misrepresents the decisions that governments have to take a good deal less. This can only be a good thing, surely?

It’s almost self-evident that a manifesto stuffed with pledges will reduce the scope for pragmatism. Election campaigns where parties pledge to take particular decisions have always resulted in broken promises and poorer policies. They also reveal a fatally compromised approach to policy that can’t be commensurate with good governance. They represent an attempt to buy-off vocal and active pressure groups at the expense of The General Will.

In 1983, Labour fell foul of ‘The Longest Suicide Note in History’ – I posted elsewhere on how an obsession mandates damaged Labour at the time. In 1997 – and in subsequent elections – Labour also succumbed to the temptation of using pledges to counteract its problems with the media – at best, fair-weather friends – and it’s overwhelming sense that the public didn’t trust it. The relationship with the press was never addressed and one can’t really conclude that the public trust Labour (or politicians in general) more now than they used to.

Necessity, that is. It’s Budget Day and the cuts are in the post. My incredible predictive powers tell me that government spending may be under a bit of pressure shortly.

If you’re not a regular over at William Heath’s Ideal Government blog, this post is a good introduction to his general themes. In his overview of his preoccupations, this one stands out:

We haven’t yet seriously started on co-creation or participative public services where the systems delivered are formally designed successfully to meet a real need, and created, measured and improved with active input from those it’s intended to help

The possibilities (and often, the idealism) of open-source advocacy couched in these terms may offer us a clue to where the value of participation may really be acknowledged in the short term. At any point in the day, the most enraged person in the UK is probably the one who has had to deal with the sublime idiocy of HMG IT procurement most recently.

As a microcosm of what’s wrong with our democracy, there can be few better examples. It’s substantially driven by insidious pressure groups (suppliers) who have captured departements and are capable of cranking up demand for what they are selling. As my friend Dominic Campbell put it recently, it’s time people start getting fired for buying IBM.

Politicians are particularly exposed here. The level of responsibility that they bear for expensive IT failures or the purchase of White Elephants is roughly at an inverse proportion to their ability to make those decisions. IT procurement is a complex and (deliberately?) mystifying process. Civil servants can often get away with huge mistakes and acts of carelessness that would be difficult to imagine in the Ministry of Defence the NHS.

And while some of us have huge reservations about the potential of citizens to get involved directly shaping schools or local authorities, IT procurment – with the existance of a large, well-networked open-source community (and a bunch of clever FOI-savvy geeks who really hate IT procurement) – may well provide the textbook example of how participative design can result in much better outcomes, better strategy, more bureaucratic accountability and tons of cost-savings.

We’ll see. (Have a look at this Government IT spend infographic that William points to by the way if you want to see how much cash is at stake here).

So what mandate does the new government have? K-punk (in a wider, very good post) quotes Melanie Phillips saying that “no-one voted for a hung parliament.”

Slavoj Žižek - click for credit

Before the election, there was a persistent rumbling around Gordon Brown’s legitimacy as PM (he didn’t win a general election) that seems strangely lacking around David Cameron – arguably less legitimate than Brown by the same arguments.

All of this demonstrates the dangers inherent in the way that the UK’s constitutional arrangements are reified into … well … a constitution. As the press coverage in the days following the election confirmed, our constitution appears to be whatever newspaper editors think that they would like it to be.

Dealing with this, K-Punk quotes extensively from an article by the Slovenian Marxist writer, Slavoj Žižek in which a similarly reified concept – the market – is debunked:

“Each individual perceives market as an objective system confronting him, although there is no objective market but just the interaction of the multitude of individuals – so that, although each individual knows very well that there is no objective market, just the interaction of individuals, the specter of ‘objective’ market is this same individual’s fact-of-experience, determining his beliefs and acts. Not only market, but our entire social life is determined by such reified mechanisms……”

Continuing….

“Prosopopoeia is usually perceived as a mystification to which naïve consciousness is prone, i.e., as something to be demystified…. Dupuy recalls how sociologists interpret electoral results: for example, when the government retains its majority, but barely does so, the result is read as ‘the voters prolonged their trust into the government, but with a warning that it should do its work better’, as if the electoral result was the outcome of the decision of a single meta-Subject (voters) who wanted to deliver a ‘message’ to those in power.”

This helps us to look at the 2010 election afresh and determine what we actually know about it.

We know that it returned 650 MPs, all of whom received the largest number of votes in their constituencies (though many failed to receive a majority).

We know that every vote that those MPs received was cast for slightly different reasons and with slightly different levels of conviction. Many voters hadn’t made up their minds until they lowered their pencil onto the ballot paper. The day prior to the election, ITV’s polling told them that 38 per cent of the voters said it was “quite possible” they would change their mind before voting. Other polls at over 2.5 million voters as ‘undecided’ at the same point. If we had an electoral system that allowed people to divide their vote up in some way, we may have got a very different result indeed.

We know that many votes were cast ‘tactically’ – not for a candidate but against them. We also know (and I can’t remember where I read this*) that a lot of ‘tactical’ votes were cast stupidly – people either believed in ropey statistics or just didn’t research it properly and ended up voting for the third-strongest party on the ballot in a quest to stop the bookies favourite.

We know that every MP will have slightly different levels of allegiance to their party leader. I suspect that Charles Clarke or Frank Field would be fairly relaxed about having David Cameron as a PM if the alternative were Gordon Brown. On a much larger and profounder scale, we know that many people who voted Lib-Dem may have changed their vote had they known for certain that the Lib-Dems would go into coalition with the Tories. We just don’t know how many.

And so on. The reified election results mask a much more complex set of factors in which preferences were weighted, outcomes gamed and errors were compounded.

The only thing we know for certain is that those MPs that were returned got more votes than their strongest rivals and that is the only legitimacy that the whole election campaign bestows. Strangely – and sadly – the bizarre way that the British discuss their constitutional settlement consistently serves to mask this fact.

It’s a shame, because it’s the most attractive and defensible aspect of our constitutional settlement such as it is. It makes the case for a greater focus upon individual elected representatives and candidates and for a greater measure of independence for them once they’re elected.

*Tim Harford’s More or Less podcast during the election highlighted the way that parties misrepresented previous electoral statistics to dupe tactical voters into making the wrong choice.

I was very sad to hear – via Slugger – of the passing of ‘Horseman’ – one of the better (anonymous) bloggers that I have in my RSS feed.

Being busy, I missed his last posting on his Ulster’s Doomed! blog – a terrifically good one at that.

Writing about our image of politicians, Horseman points to one country that stands out – Sweden.

“In Sweden 43.8% of people have a ‘rather favourable’ opinion of their politicians, compared with an EU average of 12.4%. And only 18.4% of Swedes have a ‘rather unfavourable’ opinion, against the EU average of 55.4%.

Swedes are not foolish people, and are no more likely to be fooled by their politicians than anyone else, so what these results show is that Swedish politicians are simply better than any others. If their voters have a positive opinion of them it must be because they are more honest, more diligent, more representative and more efficient than any others.

And, of course, good politicians lead to good politics and good governance – and these lead, almost inevitably, to a more responsive state in which the needs of the people are served better than elsewhere. No wonder Sweden is close to the top of the list in almost every international comparison, whether it is looking at freedom, affluence, education, development or happiness.

Whatever it is that Swedish politicians are doing, they are doing it well, and their voters are happy with them. We need to learn from them.”

We may all have our explanations for this. My own suspicion is that there is a more entrenched culture of inclusion and an awareness of (and strategy for neutralising) the damaging disruption that unrepresentative pressure groups and media interests bring to bear on public life.

But back to Horseman, briefly. He was a very good blogger – quite a number cruncher and one with an idiosyncratic standpoint (as all of the best bloggers have). His main story was a belief that the nationalist electorate would overtake the unionist one in Northern Ireland at some point in the middle-future. It wasn’t one that I bought wholesale, given the relative lack of actual hardcore nationalist sentiment among Northern Ireland catholics. But that’s for another day.

My sympathies are with his family and friends for whom he must be a huge loss.

The Election 2010 blog is asking ‘what election was that‘?

“The opening book in the ‘Nuffield’ election series – The British General Election of 1945 – lists a series of ‘named’ elections: 1874, when the Liberals went down in a flood of gin and beer; the Midlothian election of 1880; the Khaki election of 1900; the Chinese Slavery election of 1906; the People’s Budget election of 1910; the ‘Hang the Kaiser’ election of 1918; and the 1924 ‘Zinovieff letter’ election.”

The Internet election maybe? Well, no. I was at the Personal Democracy Forum GE 2010 event at the RSA the other night. It was a great panel, but it says a lot about the way that the blogopsphere has amplified so many voices that there wasn’t that much that was said on the stage that those of us who follow these things hadn’t heard before. But Mark Pack – a Lib-Dem blogger – stepped up from the floor and really stole the show. Wisely, Mick has signed him up for a post on Slugger – here:

“…many of those who have been asking “will the next election be the first internet election?” have been asking the wrong question. At the internal, organisational level the internet had already become essential prior to this election. What in effect many of the questioners (especially those in the style of Clay Shirky and Joe Trippi) have been hoping is that the internet will remake politics in a non-hierarchical style.

Whether politics – or other forms of human organisation – can be non-hierarchical is a very different question from what uses YouTube should be put to. It is one I am sceptical about, especially when you see how quickly structures have emerged in the communities growing up on tools such as Twitter which, at a technical level, are very egalitarian and non-hierarchical.

Where does this all leave us? In the end, the election was primarily about what politicians did and how the public voted rather than about technologies and techniques. And you know what? That doesn’t seem so bad at all.”

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.

“Well isn’t this an exciting moment?”

I got ‘the fisheye’ when I said this earlier today to a bleary-eyed crowd of people who had been canvassing for different parties in Northern Ireland.

Some of them were into their thirtieth hour without sleep. There’s a time and a place for train-spottery musings about constitutional permutations.

Electoral reform looks like it’s on the cards though. Whatever the Lib-Dems say, I doubt that they will exit a moment where they can exert leverage without firstly securing a commitment to PR – probably of the STV variety.I’ve tried to stick to observations on this blog that I’ve not heard widely elsewhere, and my two points for today are…

• Everyone seems to be saying that the Lib-Dems will do a deal with the Tories. They are obliged to run this by their membership (remember the ‘Cyberlock‘?) and I’m not sure that they will stomach a deal with the Tories that readily. Also, the electorate seemed to be quite keen on a Lib-Lab deal
• On the other hand Labour has a minority of MPs with a visceral hatred of PR and they may struggle to honour any deal they offer the Lib-Dems

We’ll see. On the issue in question, I’m undecided whether PR is a good thing. OK – it may secure a more proportionate representation from the available political parties, but does it give us a government that more accurately represents the General Will? Political parties are, after all, largely coalitions of people who come together to game the voting system.

Can more people tick of more comparison points within the government that match their own views? And more importantly, can the government be said to be hitting any kind of sweet spot in representing the material interests of the nation? Carrying out the wishes of the public – expressed and implicit – are surely what democracies claim to do?

So PR? Not sure. But voting reform? That’s a different matter. There are two obvious benefits, I think?

Firstly, I think that STV elections will be more frank and less groupthinky – less of a scrabble for the middle ground. In ordering our preferences there seem to me to be two advantages: The discourse will be more flexible and inclusive. If someone who has views outside of the hotly-contested centre ground is going to have their votes re-allocated, more of the parties will court their vote and seek to compromise with them.

That calculation in which I asked how far governments reflect the expressed wishes of the public would seem to work out OK under STV. More people will vote and politicians will be sent clearer messages and engage in more debate (which is good, right?). And remember – after the last few weeks – other forms of gauging opinion are not very reliable. Remember Cleggmania? Where did that go?

Secondly, politicians will know what they’re being told. Today, Nick Clegg – despite a fairly poor showing – will decide who will form the next government. He can’t reliably ask those who voted for him (remember, opinion-polling sucks!). Lots of his voters were Labour tactical voters, and some were Tories gaming the system to keep Labour out. Some were bona-fide Lib-Dems. And with all of that scepticism about polling, a new version of a poll like this one (!) would be interesting.

OK, we’re still left with the fundamental problem with elections in that they don’t allow us to weight preferences in the way that we do when we tell bookies what we think will happen. But you can’t have everything.

So I’m quite keen on STV. It only leaves me with one question on which I don’t know the answer: Will it foreground the representative and diminish the powers of political parties relative to MPs?

Anyone know the answer to this one?

I think that a lot of election commentary is missing something important about how we vote. As some commenters here have said, in the past, ‘at elections, we order our preferences’.

That makes this really interesting. Nick Clegg doesn’t seem to be strongly objected to in the way that Gordon Brown and David Cameron are. Could the Lib Dems win my a landslide?

Digest these figures……

Update: What if Clegg could convince a significant number of us that he was winning.

This is a guest post by Hugh Flouch of Harringay Online

People love living in Harringay, but there are a few quality of life issues that won’t get the attention they need unless citizens and elected representatives enter into a democratic compact to fix them. It doesn’t take a genius to work out that this is the time to be having the conversations which can build towards that covenant. Local websites provide a great forum for them.

So, starting in February, at Harringay Online we’ve been building up our stock of information on the local elections, from how they work to what we can find out about the candidates. I don’t want the elections to completely dominate the site, since by no means everyone is interested, but I do want to offer people, perhaps for the first time ever, an opportunity to find out who the local candidates are and what they might do if elected.

I’ve pretty much always voted in the local elections, out of a sense of civic duty as much as anything else. I imagine that’s not unusual. By covering the local elections, I hope we’re filling in some gaps for people like me and perhaps encouraging those who’ve not bothered to vote in the past to get involved, if for just one day out of every 1,460.

There are three wards which fall partly or entirely within our neighbourhood. That’s 29 candidates. To start with we’re trying to build up online portfolios on each of them. So far we have basic information on most of them, including bios. We’re also digging around, and lifting the curtain, seeing what else we can find out, mainly through a Google-based search.

We’re adding short video interviews with as many candidates as we can as well as the leaders of the main party groupings. Quite a novelty to see video of your local candidates in your living room, if you think about it.

Finally, we’ve taken a leaf out of the Democracy Club‘s book and we’re uploading copies of all local election leaflets

We’re still hoping to organise a hustings, but a number of logistical problems mean that we’re cutting it fine. Our plan is to use a “real-world” venue and also use Cover-it-Live to take the event into people’s homes.

As well as giving local people a better sense of who’s who and what they think, we hope that this indelible record will go some way towards holding our elected officials to account in the years to come.

The initial reaction of the candidates was mixed as was their willingness to be involved. Some were enthusiastic; others were extremely cautious. They’re coming round. Trust seems to be building as they recognise that we’re trying to be scrupulously fair.

In my naivety, I assumed that the politicians would be our biggest challenge. As things are turning out it may well be that the biggest issues will be thrown up the heartfelt passions of some HoL contributors. Curating discussions fuelled by those passions whilst successfully riding out accusations of being in the politicians’ pockets is proving to be a wild ride at times.

However, as long as members continue to add posts like this, I’ll keep doing what I’m doing:

I think this kind of scrutiny is superb I wasn’t going to vote in the Euro elections but did so because of Harringay Online putting the link to working out how individuals views tally with which party. Perhaps I’m rather superficial but that little exercise fired me up not only did I vote but told friends and neighbours who aren’t a part of HOL and they all did the online quiz thing. This created great discussion and at least four other people who weren’t going to vote did so. So, the citizen power of HOL stretches beyond just its members!!

Many of us can’t be bothered with politics and HOL has made me think about voting and invite the neighbours in – the elderly, those for whom English is a second language – for a cup of tea or a sherry and a pakora to discuss the message on the video.