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!)

Dave Briggs has a good post up about how organisations introduce technology. He contrasts the ‘JFDI’ approach (which stands for Just Do It) and a more boring sustainable approach.

Tactics: For teams that are scared of losing.

I’ve met Dave and he has very sensible views on Football. Our mutual friend Brian Clough could have contributed to this whole discussion. As he put it (here) …

“…tactics aren’t for me, they’re things that teams dream up because they might lose”

Translating that into Dave’s question, it’s basically about getting organisations to increase their desire and competence in the field of ‘interactivity.’ The rest – the tactical choices of which technology, the timelines and roll-out plan – become somewhat redundant when you are able to deploy a team that know what their jobs are and are happy, competent and confident that they can do them. This question applies to local authorities a good deal.

On the day that David Cameron is majoring on his notion of The Post Bureaucratic Age, there is a lesson here: So much of the division between the boring ‘tactical’ practitioners and the JFDI enthusiasts stems not from a gulf in the understanding of the technology, but in the willingness of individuals within organisations to interact.

I’ve spoken to meetings of councillors and officers at over 100 local authorities over the years, and I’ve watched the body language: When you suggest that it would be a good idea for councillors to use easy-to-use web-tools, the more senior officers in the room start to futz with their biros.

There are all kinds of ‘budget maximising’ bureaucratic reasons for this resistance, and I’m sure that this is partly Mr Cameron’s target here. But I’d suggest that there is a bigger obstacle here.

Demands for ‘transparency’ from public-sector bodies are fundamentally unfair for the reasons I’ve set out here. They are one-sided. Perhaps the biggest underlying theme in modern politics is the question of who gets taxpayers money? Is it the public sector, or their competitors in the private sector?

It’s a profoundly political decision. To demand transparency from one, not the other is to take sides, and I suspect that this is what the Conservatives are doing here.

Given the restrictions of commercial confidentiality, we can’t easily demand transparency from the private sector (though reformers demanding less short-termism in investment decisions may disagree).

One thing we can demand – from all economic actors – is more interactivity. If interactivity, not transparency were the war-cry, it would be a fairer, clearer instruction to give to everyone.

Eduardo Da Silva the cheat. Are phone-ins better at discussing sport than politics? (Click for pic attribution).

Matthew Taylor has a good post up about the architecture of morality, and it’s all the better for the fact that he’s chosen an important issue (football) to illustrate his point.

Personally, I spend six days a week tut-tutting about the way that popular political discourse is convened and managed. Panel shows on TV and radio, high-volume blogs and forums, demagogic columnists, leader-writers and the selective letters pages are all regular bugbears for the bloggers who contribute to this site and many of my favourite blogs.

On the seventh day, however, I rest. I spend the afternoons that I don’t have a ticket for the mothership shouting at Radio Five Live and occasionally I make a half-hearted (never successful) attempt to Have My Say on the 606 Show. It’s often exasperating to listen to, but some of the callers pre-occupations are spot on – particuarly (returning to Matthew’s starting point) about diving in the penalty box.

On big moral issues, a highly public shouting match always hits the problem of the ‘hard to reach’ and ‘hard to avoid’ groups. So you get what Tom Freeman calls ‘quality uncontrolled audience participation’ – slightly unrepresentative views from contributors .. “..frothing at the mouth at what some council somewhere is doing to stop ordinary British hardworking families from setting fire to Muslims’ heads, because of so-called health and safety.” (A line too good not to pinch – from here).

The thing is, on 606, because the BBC isn’t the Daily Mail, most of the more obnoxious racist bile gets filtered out. But we’re still left with a baying crowd – often led by a really annoying cheerleader (Alan Green). Why should it be easier to extract the distributed wisdom ‘signal’ from the horde of shouty blokes ‘noise’ when the subject is football?

I’d argue that it is easier. And the reason for this is in the partisanship. Supporters of hundreds of different clubs converge on 606 and the big premiership clubs aren’t massively over-represented. At the end of it, you can leave with a picture of what the balance of opinion is on cheating or poor refereeing. It’s not a complex subject and few people are really excluded from the conversation. Everyone, apart from Arsenal fans think that Eduardo should be slapped down for his dive against Celtic.

Politics and public life just isn’t like that. On the one hand, it is at least as partisan as football, though most spectators would’t thinks so given the narrow pre-rehearsed set of positions that are used to discuss most issues. The clash of interests and perspectives is also at least as pronounced. But in public affairs, most sides of the argument never turn up. Low income groups, people who work long hours, and most importantly, people that don’t have a settled strong view on big issues – they will never turn up to a public meeting or dash off a frothing letter to the local rag.

What we are left with, in politics, is a handful of highly over-represented positions, curated by media owners that are both partisan and monopolistic.

In a society that has a wide range of low-level corruption and graft on offer, why have we spent most of 2009 preoccupied with MP’s failings? I suspect that the answer lies in the fact that this kind of corruption is very much on the radar of a highly unrepresentative portion of society – but one that can always be counted on to get their voice heard. It illustrates why it is so important that the ‘hard to reach’ groups are included in one way or another. Perhaps it’s a argument for making some decisions along the lines of Anthony Barnett’s lottery-based model of Athenian Democracy?

Power to the people!

The #rebootbritain hashtag on Twitter went haywire on Monday as over 700 people attended the event – I spent over an hour on Tuesday night searching through it and the earliest session I could get to in that time was a 4pm one – it actually challenged #michaeljackson for prominence on Twitter’s trending indicator.

Because I organised six of these sessions, I was confined to them and missed some other attractive ones. Of the six, the session of that I may have the most notable outcome was the one I helped Tim Davies to put together. He’s detailed it here, and the whole enterprise is a tribute to his imagination and industry.

If there’s one thing that I think Tim and I totally agree upon, it’s that these questions have a strongly political nature. They’re not simply neutral bureaucratic or managerial issues (indeed bureaucratic neutrality isn’t a notion that stands much examination, is it?)

To underline this, we jointly organised a session entitled ‘Political Theory 2.0′ at Barcamp earlier this year.

I tried to illustrate the political nature behind the need for an ‘Interactive Charter’ a while ago here, and we tried to make the session one that was focused around campaigning rather than worrying around the details. Whenever people come together to discuss these things, I always get the sense that they’re dancing to the sterile box-ticking rhythm of middle-managers rather than addressing the real challenges (or, more simply, the big challenge) that we face.

It’s the insight that marked Marx, Churchill, Che Guevara, Margaret Thatcher, Lenin, Tony Blair and Genghis Khan from the rest of us:

You make nothing happen until powerful forces are more frightened of you than they are of the others.

How many reams of reports, pilots, guidance, assessments, audits, research papers, initiatives and written-up brainstorms have we read telling us what that the dogs in the street have known for a long time? Surely all of these exercises are examples of co-option into an incompatible agenda?

We simply say we want to make organisations that touch our lives more transparent, interactive and responsive. We could shorten that and say we want them to behave in a human way. It’s not an unreasonable or extreme demand.

We want them to talk to us, listen to us and reason with us. We want them to ignore us when we’re being petulant and stupid and we want them to notice when we mention something that they hadn’t though of.

They know they should do it. In some cases, they’ve known that they’ve had the means at their disposal to do it for some time. A handful want to do it but can’t face the internal aggro. We’ve spent the last six months drawing MPs accross the coals because we know that some of them will jump when we shout at them.

Now, the real challenge is in Whitehall and in the Town Halls. The permanent staff who will still be there when the politicians have been red-carded. The management consultants who have been able to use each contract they win to create two more for themselves.

The QUANGOs that spend eight-figure sums each year purely to detoxify decisions that politicians could take. The campaign groups that set the pace but mask their paymasters’ agendas that are not in the public interest.

It’s time that we forced all of these organisations to come clean. Addressing the fifty hurdles that have been identified will enable organisations to take a giant step towards that openness. It’s what Trotskyists used to call a ‘transitional demand.’

We won’t do this purely by reasoning with them. As the MySociety campaign on Parliamentary expenses showed, you have to give them nowhere to wriggle. There is no point at pitching this at middle managers. None of this will be achieved by a conventional get-together of egg-heads or clever geeks.

The only way to make organisations do this is to use a combination of carrot and stick to get the people at the top of organisations to make a decisive change that they can’t get water down when the heat is off.

And though I’m happy to frame it as a political question, I’m confident that it’s one that will find supporters and opponents in all of the major political parties.

At the meeting that we had on Monday, I believe that we resolved to collectively do the following:

• Jointly check that the 50 Hurdles wiki is relevant and accurate – let’s get it right.
• Jointly pull together all of these things that we’ve been saying to each other about how marvelous interactivity is and how many problems it can solve – and put it into a short businesslike document that is much harder to ignore.
• Jointly think through the problems that a supportive big-wig would face and look at ways they can be overcome
• Pull it all together into a charter that anyone at the top of an organisation can sign.

This document has to be a tool for those people who work in organisations that they’d like to change in this way. We’d like to use MixedInk to convene this charter and anyone can contribute. Tom Watson MP was at the session and he said that he would put down an early day motion (EDM) supporting the resulting document. By the autumn, we could have something that we can campaign around.

We can look at how we get those who describe their role as one of ‘leadership’ to publicly commit to an acceptable timescale – and monitor how they’re doing.

Because remember, comrades, that the great only appear great because we are on our knees. Let us rise!

PS: I hope that a journalist somewhere is watching how Andrew Stott sidesteps this question – it should provide the basis for quite a good Public Administration textbook!

• For twitterers: There’s a science to getting retweeted, you know?
• Trying to explain something? No need to reinvent the wheel.
• A bit of politics to spice up the end of a hot week: Are social liberals so open-minded about the BNP that their brains have fallen out? (I’m guessing you’ve heard the ‘British Eggs for British Nazis’ yoke joke, have you?

If you haven’t seen Socrata yet, it’s really worth a look – it illustrates the quality of data that could be made available to us in the UK.

It shows that – once we get beyond the classic journalistic question of “why is this lying bastard lying to me?” – once the data is in the public domain – that this information can be used to model the big questions of our time – turned into interfaces that allow us to explore and model problems.

Take the data, add crowdsourced intelligence, and you may end up with a much better description of the problems that policymakers face.

It also shows why the Guardian’s ‘Free Our Data‘ campaign is so important.

Neil Williams has a good post up about the need to break some institutions into a more interactive world slowly. The Hansard Society’s Andy Williamson had a similar post up here a while ago:

Innovation fails when the people with the ideas aren’t matched by the ones with the skills and power to make those ideas happen. End-to-end innovation – and, therefore, eDemocracy – takes in the whole of the organisation.

I’d argue that this is a political issue. Or, more to the point, it’s something that requires a political leadership. That can’t happen, however, until we address one of the key problems in promoting innovation in the UK: That the relationship between the permanent bureaucracy and the elected one is not one that promotes innovation of this kind.

In Yes Minister, Jim Hacker’s bright ideas were always punctured when Sir Humphrey congratulated him on making a courageous decision. It was a clear shot across the boughs.

I don’t want to get into the massive debate around the neutral civil service that we have in the UK, in contrast to the in-and-outers that other countries have. Suffice to say that…

a) I wish we had less of a fetish of neutrality here

b) You understand what the word hegemony means when you challenge the idea of civil service neutrality in the UK. It’s like poking a cage of tigers with sharp sticks.

But I will say this: It’s hard to see how this will change as long as politicians believe that they will be hopelessly exposed when they demand innovation and risk-taking from their departments. We currently break what I beleive should be a golden rule here: Never place 100% of the blame for failure upon the shoulders of someone with a veto. It’s a recipe for stagnation.

This is why, in order to promote a change in the attitude to the take-up of social media as a means of improving the quality of governance, the PICamp strand of Reboot Britain next Monday (6th July) will include a session dealing with what Tim Davies has identified as the ’50 small hurdles’ that prevent public bodies from unlocking their knowledge and opening themselves up to more conversational interactive processes.

At this session, we are hoping that participants will take part in the creation of an interactive charter that will create a momentum to remove these obstacles and promote a more open and transparent policy making. In fact, we’re hoping that more than just a charter will come out of the session – watch this space for more detail.

Euan Semple will be there to reinforce the benefits of interactivity, and Jeremy Gould – the erstwhile Whitehall Webby will be there – metaphorically stripped to the waist and showing us the scars he picked up

This session will be happening at 1.30pm in the Siemans Room

I thought I’d offer you a bit of an outline of the PICamp (Political Innovation Camp) strands that are making up part of NESTA’s Reboot Britain event next week. You’ll see that the sessions that are planned reflect a lot of the issues that come up on this blog regularly.

We’re offering these because we believe that innovation doesn’t just affect business and public administration. It often offers the potential to break out of a political stalemate.

Like the stalemate that politicians, journalists and bloggers are in. Like the stalemate between declining local newspapers and local authorities.

Every senior politician says that they want to devolve power down to local government. Local government says that it wants more power devolved from the centre.

But every politician also knows that this will never happen as long as the public blame central government for poor local services. Innovators can help local authorities raise their game, create new communications channels and start to address this problem.

Politicians know that they face obstacles when they want their departments to raise their game. Whether it’s the risk-averse veto groups in middle management or procurement rules that reward box-ticking rather than imagination, they know that the easy answers have all been tried.

These are small administrative hurdles rather than big political ones. Politicians and innovators can tackle these problems together.

Politicians also know that – if they yield to demands for a more participative politics – that they run the real risk of disenfranchising large sections of the population that are prepared to vote in elections, but that don’t have the ability or the confidence to fight their corner as active citizens.

Politicians will need to call for help from politically-aware innovators if they are to meet demands for participation while preserving the universal franchise.

In many cases, it isn’t just innovation, but political innovation that is needed. Politicians can offer the leadership, but they need to know that innovators are focussed upon their problems – and not just commercial and administrative ones.

It’s time for innovators to help get politicians out of the political stalemate that they are stuck in. Most of these issues will not simply be solved by a general election and a change of government.  They involve the kind of game-changing ideas that have altered so many other sectors of public life.

You can book your tickets for Reboot Britain here. If you’re interested in any of these issues, scan the schedule for more information on them, or please visit www.picamp.org and meet some of the session initiators. I’m hoping to encourage them to just flesh out what they are planning to talk about on this site a bit in advance of the event next Monday.

An Elephant yesterday. Best eaten a bit at a time. (Image: Wikimedia Commons - click for credit)

Shorter version: Often, the minor technical obstacles mask a wider small-p political obstructionism to the promotion of a more interactive form of government.

Having written this post about the small obstacles to open e-gov a few weeks ago, Tim Davies got such a comprehensive response in his comments thread that he’s rolled them out into a wiki.

The idea that there are ’50 small hurdles’ is a very powerful one – it enables those who want to move small mountains to understand that it can be done in the same way that an Elephant can be eaten: A bit at a time.

I think that Tim has missed an important one out, but I’m reluctant to break the symmetry and tidiness of the ’50′ number. It’s an important one though, and probably a bit less straightforward than the obstacles that Tim has identified, so the omission is understandable:

Promoting interactivity between local government and citizens is a thorny one. It presents a huge amount of potential for disruption. Nominally, under our political settlement, elected councillors are the ones that formally do policy.

Some local authorities take the view that their officers should be doing some research, second-guessing what their political leadership are thinking, and presenting well-thought-out options that the executive can enact. This is an obstacle because elected councillors don’t have the capacity to conduct a role that is legitimately theirs. Permanent officials do have that capacity, but strictly speaking, it’s not their job.

Then there is the additional obstacle – the highly centralised relationship between central and local government. In reality Councillors have few powers, and many of them are illusory. Often, they have the power to enact one of a couple of highly confined options that have been presented to them by central government.

And where they do have powers, these are often restricted by a highly bureaucratic approach to the the various pieces of guidance or codes that have been handed down from central government. A classic of the kind is a conversation that I picked up over the weekend in which council officers were seriously asking if it would be a breach of the publicity code if councils were to publicise councillors’ Twitter / Facebook accounts on council literature.

Anyone who is working to promote an interactive local conversation ignores this obstacle at their peril. In seven years working on a project that was designed to encourage councillors to start taking up simple interactive tools, I visited well over 150 local authorities. With few exceptions, the hour-long meetings generally followed this pattern:

• Presentation of the idea (10 mins)
• General agreement that it would be worth doing in principle (5 mins)
• Discussion of a question raised about how such a project could be compatible with the publicity code (40 mins)
• Conclusion that no decision to proceed could be taken at the moment, and that it needed to be looked into further (“we’ll get back to you”). (5 mins)

The frustrating thing about this is that – in those seven years, working with over 50 local authorities (half of whom had the project set up for them by regional government), the publicity code has never presented a half-serious problem. One grandstanding BNP councillor tested the code to the limit, and I suspect he did it so that he could brag that he’s been ‘gagged’ by the PC brigade (and it backfired on him completely).

But apart from that, it’s a non-issue. 

In 2005, I raised this problem with the ODPM and they commissioned research and published comprehensive guidance on the matter. The research resulted in a long document that, in a very crabwise way, stated the obvious. That encouraging councillors to use this technology was A Good Thing – this guidance can be viewed on all of it’s longevity and glory. They then followed this up with detailed legal advice.

It took me years of lobbying to get local government officials to acknowledge that this was a problem and get HMG to ccommission the research. It would be the understatement of the year to say that many senior local government officials are not that keen to encourage councillors to engage with the public on policy issues.

And then, once I’d succeed there and designed a system that could be implemented without breaching any of the various codes, the ICELE research concluded that it could be done – in exactly the way that we designed it (our problem solving involved a few short hours of intellectual manual labour and one meeting with a local government lawyer).

And then, at the end of this, most councils are still not doing anything to encourage the use of interactive tools among their councillorsI can promise you that if I visited most councils in the UK now, the meeting would still follow the pattern outlined above. And now officers are wondering whether they can point to councillors’ twitter pages on council literature.

This post has gone on for long enough, so I’ll save the second half of it until later. As a preview, though….

• Councillors do not work full time for councils
• Full time staff get training on basic ICT skills
• If councils want councillors to be active users of ICT tools they need to make them more usable.

Tim’s list of technical lock-downs tells only half of the story here. For people who don’t use email in their day-job (and many are retired from jobs that never involved using a PC), asking them to master Outlook, download attachments, change them, forward them, etc, is an obstacle too far.

Councillors are the most important people in the Town Hall from a democratic point of view. They warrant a special usability consideration. All they usually get is the injunction to take-it-or-leave it.

Obama: Has the attention of the internet. Can councillors match this at a local level?

Neighbourhood blogger Kevin Harris has emailed me with a tip about this post over at SmartMobs: According to this Pew survey … 

Some 74% of internet users-representing 55% of the entire adult population–went online in 2008 to get involved in the political process or to get news and information about the election. This marks the first time that a Pew Internet & American Life Project survey has found that more than half of the voting-age population used the internet to get involved in the political process during an election year.

So what does this mean for local democracy? Here are my two hasty conclusions on what are, I think, the key opportunities that this presents:

1. Because the costs (both financial, and in terms of expertise) of web publishing and interaction have fallen dramatically, this could lead to a weaker political centre and the emergence of a new more personalised local politics
2. Because more people can publish and interact, the signal to noise ratio has changed – there appears to be a noiser-than-ever focus upon the activities of the political centre, and a marked frigidity at a local level in using new media tools

I have my own explanations for this frigidity, but I’d be interested to hear yours…..